The Kitchen is done-ish!
Country Edition
Hello again friends! It is the post that you have all been waiting for… time to show off the (mostly finished) kitchen! If I wait to post when it is actually finished, we may all be dead by then. Everything you see here was done by July of 2023, so we have had a full year of enjoying this kitchen!
There was also a bunch of work that Mike did with his parents and uncle to remove the wall between the kitchen and dining room so we could have a truly open concept.
I posted about that in this post. It looked like this:
Megapost - living room and bedroom updates!
Country Edition
Hello friends! This is a MEGAPOST AKA photo dump where I am just going to dump a bunch of things that we did. I hate to admit that all of these things we did last year and I have been too lazy to post due to…life. So trying to catch up by putting a bunch of them in one post. There will be many Thambi sightings amongst these pics, with various stages of fluff, showing the random passage of time.
First off, installing a lovely new light fixture in the master bedroom. Mike used a new tool which you can plug into a lightbulb adapter and then use another tool to test which switch it is in the electrical panel, by hovering over it until it beeps. It’s a pretty nifty device and has been very handy as we have had to turn of the electricity in various parts of the house for various installations:
Forest Creatures!
Country Edition
Hello friends! I started a new job in May and apparently that coincided with the last time I posted, as the new job has been a bit intense. But I think in 2024, it should calm down a bit and certainly this holiday season is giving me a chance to catch up on some long overdue posts! This covers some wallpaper work that we did back in February.
Mike and I did a bit of peel-n-stick wallpaper in our DC townhouse a few years ago and it wasn’t too bad! I wanted the guest bedrooms in the country house to have a bit of a theme and this wallpaper I found on Spoonflower really embodied the Animal Theme I was going for! I was debating getting some wallpaper with farm animals, which perhaps would have been more country, but as we aren’t in a real farmhouse (although our neighbors do have horses, chickens, and cows), I decided to go with these forest creatures which one could find in nearby Shenandoah Park. I also like the black, bold background against the sort of whimsical illustrations.
Dresser on the cheap
Country Edition
Hello friends! We have been hard at work on the country house and that has really taken priority over blogging about it, per normal. I did this project back in Dec / Jan over the holiday break.
I have been trying to stick to a budget in furnishing and decorating the house. As of this writing, I am $18 under the budget based on estimates for all the purchases so far, so I think we’ve done pretty well! This type of project is one of the ways that we are being creative in sticking with the budget. We needed a dresser for our bedroom but I was hesitant to buy a cheaply made one because nothing would annoy me and Mike more than having drawers that don’t work well. The cheapest dressers I could find that had an ok style and had decent quality were in the $800 range which was just too expensive. So I embarked on this Ikea hack that I saw on Pinterest! The Ikea Tarva dresser comes in unfinished, solid pine pieces - it was around $300 at the time that we bought it and came in a bunch of pieces below.
A Construction Crew
Country Edition
Renovating a whole house in our free time can sometimes be overwhelming. We had made a lot of progress by November, but there was still SO much to be done. Shortly after kitchen demo in October, Mike began to contemplate whether we would ever finish.
Luckily, we had some help that came in November! The rest of this post covers a few weeks of work.
More after the jump