Kitchen Remodel: A Prelude

I've been a homeowner now for a year and a half. It sort of feels like no time, and then it also feels like forever.

I'm super happy with the home Mr. Law and I decided to purchase, and it was an incredibly hard decision to make. We looked at houses on Long Island, where we were both born and raised (and where our hearts still reside), we looked at condos (and almost bought one) in stunning pre-war buildings that were total restorations (aka gut-jobs), and then reality set in and we decided to purchase something that maybe wasn't our dream home, but it was our perfect first home. So, we now call our little two bed and two bath condo home sweet home, and we love it.

Our unit was the least updated unit in our entire development, so we knew right from the start that we would need to be doing some updating. We knew the two bathrooms and the kitchen needed total remodels. They were originals from the early 80s when the condo was built. Ick!

Within three months of moving in we decided to redo our main bathroom, here are the before and after pictures of the bathroom:

ps- we did eventually find a light fixture to go above the mirror!

Next on the renovation hit-list is the kitchen. We had planned on doing it this past fall, but we've had a few other things pop up that have caused us to push the reno into mid-January. It's ironic because the one and only thing the previous owners updated in our unit was the hardwood floors; and luck would have it that our neighbors had a leak and all of our floors buckled. Right now we are having it out with the insurance company to get our floors replaced. We are hoping to have that done before the kitchen work starts.

I'm hoping that once the floors are done I'll actually be able to start updating the rest of our home. I had partially done the living room, which I talked about in this post, and I'm really upset that after all of the hard work to build our TV unit, the sucker needs to be taken apart in order to have the floors done over. Just my luck. I've decided not to do any other decorating or anything until the floors are done, it's just too much of a pain to take everything apart.

Anyway, back to the kitchen....I'm looking forward to this project the most. Our kitchen is a disaster. It's a tiny little "pocket" kitchen, as one of our friends once put it. But even if she is pocket sized, she is super efficient!

Here are some pictures of our kitchen as it is now (don't mind the mess, I was preparing dinner when the pictures were snapped):

Makes you want to puke a little, right?

We've decided to go with white painted wood cabinets, quarts counters, glass tile backsplash and stainless appliances. I can't wait to see the finished product!

Here are some of our inspiration pictures (more can be found on my kitchen board on pinterest)

So, even though things are stressful right now, I keep telling myself: "February, February, February. It'll all be over in February."

Alright everybody, enjoy the rest of your Monday! 

Derailed by Home Ownership

I took a five day weekend and am preparing to go back to work tomorrow, which I'd love not to do, but hey, girls gotta make money. Any time I take a few days off, I always have these grand plans for how much I'll get accomplished, and then all of a sudden the time is gone, I'm back to work, and nothing really got done.

This weekend, however, I got most things done. Except for two major things, oops. Mostly, they didn't get done because I left those two things for today, and today got majorly derailed. How? Because of home ownership.

You may remember our carbon monoxide scare immediately following the honeymoon, and while that's been fixed, we're now on to the next issue. Water. Damage. From where? We don't really know.

A few months ago we noticed our new hardwood floors buckling. Within two months a three foot section of the floor totally bucked on itself and came up entirely. When we lifted the wood planks we noticed our subfloors were molded. Mold comes from water, we know that, but where is the water coming from? We don't know. Enter insurance companies. Yes, plural, since we own a condo we also have to include the insurance company for the building (since the subfloor technically belongs to the building and not us).

Here are a few pictures of the floors, which need to be replaced entirely:

Molded subflooring

part of where the floor raised completely & more mold hiding out underneath

can you see the rippling & buckling down the entire hallway?

 So on top of all the other lovely things we've got going on, we're also waiting for an engineer to come search for the leak, and once we find that bad boy - it's new floors for us! Hopefully our home won't look like a disaster for the holidays.

Just Get Things Done!

It's been a fun week for me. My favorite thing to do is to get things done - I am definitely not the type to sit around and "lounge". That being said, Mr. Law is more of the "lounge" type, and so of course we have the never ending battle of how to spend our little bits of spare time.

This week I won the battle and we got things done. I mean, we totally rocked the installation of our new entertainment unit, and even though we still have some finishing touches, I am thrilled with how it came out.

We also got all of our wedding pictures back and were able to narrow down from 1,500++ pictures down to 75 for the album. I absolutely love working with my photographers and cannot wait to get the digital files back so I can share some of the loveliness with you.

On the design side of the world, I have been working on a few different custom business card designs, the Believe Notes wedding invitation suites (any day now!!), and some other super pretty custom projects.

Tomorrow our new sofa arrives, and in case you haven't been following along, we did decide to go with the leather one. I'm both excited and nervous to see if I can accomplish my goal of making a room with a chocolate leather sofa seem light and elegant.

In the meantime, if you want to hum along with me today, I'll be listening to A Fine Frenzy, because Alison makes me feel like a little kid playing out in the field :) Love her!

Have a good day!!!