Sorry for the looong break since my last post about the house.  Click the link to see photos of the exterior, entry, living room, library, and master suite.  A lot of people commented on facebook (thank you!) and the theme was something like this: “It’s not that bad!”

Well.  There’s a reason you feel that way, dear friends.  See, I saved some of the highlights for later, which is today. Kitchen and bathrooms.  Don’t get me wrong, we love the house. (Right? or we wouldn’t have bought it. Right?)  It has tons of space and a library! HELLO, a library!  But on more than one occasion, we have found ourselves elbow-deep in conversations that go like this: “What were we thinking? Clearly, we weren’t.”

Let’s get started.

The kitchen.  Yes, that’s carpet you see there.  I remember walking around the corner from the living room and seeing the kitchen for the first time. My first thought was: “that’s carpet.”  Then I looked around and saw how spacious the kitchen was, how much cabinet space it has, and how nice it would be to have that center island work space.  Initially we thought the little bill desk would be nice but we won’t really need it if we make the library our office space.  So now we’re talking about taking out half of the wall where the desk is to  open up the kitchen to the living room and put in a breakfast bar.  You know, because that will be fast and affordable.  You can kind of tell by the first photo that it’s an eat-in kitchen.  We like that.  We’re not the formal dining room type anyway.  I forgot to take a photo of the area but it is sufficiently sized.

I’d love to replace the cabinets but I think we will have to settle for painting them and replacing all the hardware.  We looked at a granite wholesaler Sunday and found this beautiful countertop for $25/sq. ft. installed! What a deal.  I could write fifty blog posts about what I want to do in the kitchen.  Better move on.

The boys’ bathroom.  What is the obsession with carpet?  It has to go, stat.  I love the amount of cabinet/storage space.  The cabinets are already painted a light gray. Thinking about just replacing the countertop and hardware and leaving the cabinets gray.  I’d like to add another sink and put in tile floors.  Not a fan of the blue bathtub but the gray tile is in good shape so I was thinking about trying to save it to save time and money.  Anyone know if we can just put a white insert tub right over that? Have to figure out some creative way to get rid of that safety bar.  Maybe replace a few random tiles with brightly colored ones?  Their bathroom is quite spacious.  It would be one of the first things to remodel, and hopefully before we move in, because it has the only bathtub in the house.

The hall bath, located between the front door and the kitchen.  More carpet! Weee!  The bathroom is unusually gigantic for a hall bath.  Not sure what we are going to do with this space.  We have a huge attic with room to finish some space.  We are thinking about eventually putting a 4th bedroom up there for guests and possibly using this bathroom as the stairway space.  So we might not do anything with this right away.  Is that light fixture supposed to be a joke?  And why do you need that much storage space in a half bath/hall bath?

I still have to show you the basement and the boys’ rooms.  They’re not bad.  The boys rooms pretty much just need paint and new window treatments.  I think the basement is okay, but Ryan has big plans for it.  I’ll post more about it later.

What do you think?  As bad as you thought or worse?

xo,
 ~C~