Bathroom Tiling

Dave tiled the upstairs and downstairs main bathrooms a few weeks ago so I thought I would share a few photos. Below is the blue diamond patterned linoleum that was in the upstairs bathroom. 

Since we are on a slab, Dave didn't have to put backer board down for the downstairs bathroom. However, he did have to do that for the upstairs. 

We got the tile from Palmetto Tile Distributors in North Charleston. They had a great selection and were very friendly. We chose a porcelain tile that looked similar to travertine.

We used Antique White grout. At first I was afraid it would be too light but I really liked the finished look.

Below is the downstairs bathroom before grouting...

...and after grouting.

Dining Room Dream

When we bought our house we loved the fact that it had a large dining room. We didn't, however, like the chandelier or the wavy/fake tray ceiling covered in popcorn. For a while we used the room to house boxes that we hadn't yet unpacked, but last week we felt it was finally time to give the room the facelift it deserved.

When we took out the fake tray ceiling drywall pieces and scraped off the popcorn, there was a two inch gap between the wall and the ceiling. We decided to remedy this by adding crown molding. We had already spray painted the chandelier white and moved it into the kitchen so we needed to replace it. We found one for $80 on clearance at Home Depot that was perfect for the room. With the crown, new paint, chandelier, and some cheap curtains from Tuesday Morning, the entire feel of the room changed. 

Ah...tranquil.

Lowcountry Kitchen

I thought I'd share the post we did for Remodelaholic since it's a more complete picture of our kitchen renovation. Hopefully we will get some more updates on here soon since we are in the process of re-doing the dining room.

Before

After

When we moved into the new house we weren't wild about the kitchen. The cabinet doors had trim on them which caused the hardware to be mounted in an odd location. In addition, we prefer the look of shaker style doors. In our last house, Dave built new cabinets with a friend and we completely overhauled the kitchen. Since I now stay home with our daughter, we don't have the budget we had with the last house. This forced us to be a little more creative with what we already had. Dave took the trim off and belt-sanded the doors.

He used 3/4" finishing nails to add 2-1/2" wide poplar strips (off the shelf at Lowes/HD) to the door faces. Then he put wood filler where the new poplar pieces met the existing door.

He also added poplar pieces of the same thickness to our drawer fronts so they would be the same thickness as the doors. The bin pulls are discontinued Pottery Barn ones that we found for $5 each on Ebay. We will be putting the labels in soon.

We decided to get rid of the upper kitchen cabinets and try something new. As always, we were super slow with the process, so our kitchen ended up looking like this for a while until we saved up the money for the supplies we needed.

To draw the eye upward with vertical lines (and because it's pretty) we decided to use bead board behind our open shelving area. We (Dave) put wood strips on the walls and screwed them into the studs. That way we could place our brackets where we wanted and screw them into the wood. Otherwise we would be limited to mounting them at the odd stud locations.

We looked around at shelf brackets but didn't find anything we really liked. It was also hard to find anything under around $6.00 each. I showed Dave a photo of the look I liked and he thought he could re-create it. He made a jig and ended up making our brackets for under $1.50 each. I love this man.

The shelves are 3/4" thick pine boards. The choices are pretty slim when looking for boards 9+ feet long and 12" wide, but this worked out well. We bought the select pine, as it has fewer knots. We then applied poplar 1" x 2" trim (same material as the brackets) around the perimeter of the shelves to provide the shelves with more presence and help remove some of the cupping of the 12" wide boards.  The wood for all the brackets and shelves ended up being costlier than we thought, but when you consider all the money saved by having no hardware (hinges, knobs/pulls) it's still more cost effective, not to mention quicker, than building traditional cabinetry.

 

We added a painted Re-Store Chandelier, some drop cloth curtains, and an old bathroom mirror that Dave framed to the other end of the kitchen.

Before

After