Cabinets

 Just to recap, this is what the kitchen looked like before.  It was COVERED in that orange-y wood.  It was everywhere. Even the walls. It was a little bit charming, in a woodsy cabin kind of way, but not for us.  We removed the two horseshoe shotgun holders that were above the door and we began to see potential.

Let me give you a brief recap on what happened.  I don't have pictures of all of this unfortunately.  :-(

My parents took the doors off (we didn't label them!) We used this stuff called citrus-strip on the doors to take off the finish.  This was grueling labor.  Fifty year old Varnish doesn't come off easily.  We probably should have done two kinds of varnish/stain remover or two passes of the citrus strip and a washing with mineral oil in between but I was so very over it that  I didn't.

After the counter-tops were in I knew I wanted the cabinets to be gray too.  I sort of hated to cover up all the wood, because it was beautiful, just too much pine.  So my thought was to do a gray "whitewash."  Well my friends, it seems that this is not a common choice because there was very little to choose from.

I really wanted to use a product like the ones below because I thought it would be easier, but alas, they didn't have any in Gray.  :-(

We ended up with a water based tinted gray that was really dark, a white wash that was called pickled white and a clear sealer.  I was impatient so I sort of blended them together.  to get the look I was after.  These were some of the samples that I tried on an inconspicuous area. (As a side note: we didn't get the wood that clean, that is untouched wood that was previously covered by the laminate backsplash and the inside of a cabinet.) 

Another reason that this was a bad sample of what it would look like later is that this was raw wood and almost everywhere else had been stripped, but still had a slight stain to it. 

This is how they turned out.  for some reason there is a slight pink/orange hue.  It is probably because  I didn't do the whitewash before I did the graywash. But who knows.   I think they look pretty cool.  Daniel likes them too.  (We spray painted the hardware: first with a metal primer in white and then in a oil rubbed bronze, two coats, more on that at another time!)

If I had it to do all over again I would do a few things slightly different:
1) I would be more patient. (Ugh, yes I was VERY impatient about getting it done, but now I wish I had taken more time.) 
2) I would do a whole coat in the whitewash, then a whole coat in the gray-wash, then a whole coat in the pickling whitewash. (That's why I was so impatient, I sort of smeared all those together in 1 coat)
3) I would have also done the inside of the doors.
4) While we are on doors, I would have labeled them from the start. Big mistake!
5)  I wish I had known more about Chalk paint.  I think I would have considered it. (Maybe it isn't off the table)


Well next time I'll show you the floors and then what the kitchen looks like now!

love,

Sarah

when old is made new

So the floors when we bought the house were as follows:

Kitchen- "Vintage" Linoleum/Sheet Vinyl (we didn't know yet, but there were three layers)

Dining room, all three bedrooms, living room, hallway and closets-Nasty nasty beige carpet

Guest bath-original blue one inch tiles

Master bath- nasty cheap sheet vinyl (I say cheap because they do make classy sheet Vinyl

We decided that all the flooring needed to go, except the original blue bathroom tiles. We think they are charming. :) 

How did we know what was under the carpet? Let me back up a minute.  On one of our walk-throughs before we bought the house, the Realtor helped us pull up a corner of the carpet to see what was underneath.  To our astonishment there were original 50 year old hardwood floors underneath. Score. 

Naturally we  KNEW that we would rip out the old carpet, I mean, smoke smell, old smell, musty smell.  It had to go.  However, we waited until we had painted all the walls to rip out the carpet because then we didn't need to buy drop cloths and risk ruining the hardwoods.

We knew when we looked at the hardwoods under the carpet that it would need refinishing.  They weren't in horrible shape but not good shape either.  There were stains from what we assume were cats and or leaking plants or spills that didn't get cleaned up.  There were also some uneven spots (divots in the floor, small rises and falls) but they were small.  There was one place next to the kitchen where we thought that the lady mopped often with too much water. But overall, we were blessed with what seemed to be good solid floors with only minor flaws.  

They might look bad in this picture that was taken right after the carpet was pulled out, but most of that is dust and dirt.  They cleaned up pretty good. 

We looked at tons of different stains.  I took pictures of samples at stores so I could look at them later. It was agonizing.  It felt like such a big huge decision.  I had to decide what we were going to look at on the floor for possibly years to come.  I wanted a "style" that was easygoing and would "grow" with the house. Not something trendy.  

So many options for stain! Ugh!Which brand is best? What is the difference with gel stain? Is that like gel nails? It's just stronger? What color should we use? Dark or Medium? It was driving me mad!

When the men arrived to resurface the floors they looked mostly like this:

 

With some stains like these: 

When I arrived at the house after work and the floors looked like this: 

Wow! Wow! Wow! what a difference! They sanded them down and got all of the previous stain and poly (polyurethane, the clear sealer) off.  There were still some stains that lingered on,

This is one of the stains that lingered.  Some of the rough uneven spots were patched.  I'm not sure what this stuff is called, but it worked wonders.  The picture on the right is the spot near the kitchen where we guessed water from a mop continually leaked into the carpet and onto the floors.  It was the one spot we thought might need replacing.  But, Hallelujah! They fixed it!! 

 I think that seeing the raw floors helped us make our stain color choice.   It was clear to us at this point that a darker stain would be best.  So the men that were resurfacing our floors said they had two options for us to choose from.  They did some test spots. 

 We chose the bottom one.  It's called dark walnut.  We felt it showed off the wood grain better. It also hid some of the stains that were left after sanding.  

Let me tell you...

When I came home and saw what they did...

I was

floored. 

hahaahaha. 

Ok, here's the picture you've been waiting for:

So pretty!! The one on the left is the day they finished them (back in late September) 

The one on the right is from late March (earlier this week.) They are less shiny, but still beautiful!  Even with our new doggy running on them and dropping his bones everywhere.  If you know where to look you can find some of the stains, but they don't look like stains, just variations in the wood. People always comment on how lovely the floors are.  It's a wonderful feeling.  

Side note: we also had the floor refinishers put in the quarter round on the bottom.  This covered the space where the carpet was covering the baseboard when we painted it.  There were some spots we touched up, but it saved us a lot of tough labor. 

We did pay for this service.  The man that inspected our home before we bought it is a friend of ours.  He fixed a couple of things right after we moved in (switching our oven/range from electric to gas, etc.)  What I'm trying to say is he is incredibly handy!  He bought a house last year and started refinishing his own floors and he ended up hiring someone to finish.  Because we had so much floor to resurface and we had no idea how to do it, we felt it was too much for us to tackle.  

It was a pretty penny, but we are glad that we paid someone else and got it done the right way.  We also saved ourselves a lot of stress and marriage counseling. ;-) 

We still have one little untouched spot of original hardwoods for posterity. The little closet in the bathroom is hardwood and never had carpet on it and we didn't have them refinish it to match.  

A little gem in the history of our house.

What about YOU? Do you have any tips about flooring? Did any of you DIY your floors? I would love to hear about it! Leave me a comment and thanks for reading!

Later gator,

Sarah