Category: home renovation

We have tile. I’m falling into a swoon over here.

And just like that, the colour of the countertop we chose finally makes sense. Even knowing the green tile was coming, living in this unfinished kitchen for the past month I’ve been willing myself not to hate the countertop because of how uninspiring it has looked next to the cold white primed drywall. Against the green it’s suddenly beautiful, and I love it.

Having lived here for a month now, we’re completely rethinking this wall opening, and are now pretty sure about what we’ll build to fill in this space: a midcentury style wooden divider, the kind with upright dowels or spindles going through small shelves. Peter’s mother’s house had one just inside the front door, providing a screen to set the entryway off from the living room, and I’ve always wanted to incorporate one into our house. It certainly took us long enough to think of it but now that we have, it’s pretty obviously the perfect solution. We’ve been enjoying having the visual and conversational link between the two rooms, but more importantly, shelves are better suited to our maximalist decor sensibilities. And all those ceramic frogs have got to go *somewhere*.

The kitchen isn’t finished, but it’s finished enough to move in and start using, so that’s what we did over the holidays. Soon we’ll have to move all of our stuff back out from the counters to make room for the tile to be installed but for now we’re starting to get a feel for the new space. We’ve already luxuriously unfurled our mess onto the vast countertops.

We’ve been planning all along to install a grillework in that wall opening, but now that we’re actually living and cooking here it’s kind of nice having a window there so we’re going to take our time and perhaps explore different options. I’m currently leaning towards installing shutters so I can bang them open and shout killer one-liners into the living room like Florence from The Jeffersons.

I’ve never had a vent hood over the stove before and have very much been looking forward to no longer filling up our bedroom with food smells, but so far I keep forgetting to switch it on when I cook. It’s hard to learn new things in old age.

We’ve had a few days of rest in the kitchen work, waiting for appliances and the last bits of cabinet, so I was finally able to get the living room painted. We’ve lived with someone else’s joy killing beige in this room for 20 years while waiting to have the ceiling repaired, but we’re looking forward to spending the next 20 snuggled down in this cozy room with its dreamy green. The wall to the left is closest to the actual colour and I can’t wait to see how my new quilt is going to look in here.

Now to start drawing up plans for the built in shelving we’re planning for the wall that used to have a doorway through it.

Lots happening this week. Our cabinets are almost fully installed. Our countertops came early. They tried a bonkers thing to fix the old oak floorboards that were bowing up so that every step across the high traffic part of the room sounded like babow-babow: sawing a line between two floorboards to give it space to relax. It worked okay but not perfectly, but it’s a 112 year old floor so perfect isn’t really in the list of options. It’s noticeably better, though.

They took down the plastic sheeting and plywood panel from across the wide doorway between the dining room and the new kitchen, so we can finally get a sense of how the spaces feel together. It’s strange seeing that mustardy yellow (“maize”, according to the chip) against the pale chartreuse of the dining room, but I think once the green backsplash is installed it’ll be less strange.

Here’s the view into the room from that doorway. That shelf above the passthrough is the last bit of cabinet still to be finished.

You can see through the passthrough that we’ve started painting the living room a lush, mossy green. Yes, this means the entire main floor of our house is green and yellow now: chartreuse dining room, yellow and green kitchen, green living room, and the front room has two walls baby blue, the wall along the stairs buttery yellow, and the wall leading into that green living room is a beautiful ivory-and-green experiment I haven’t shown you yet. Maybe once we get the old kitchen converted into a bathroom we’ll do it in a warmer colour, but to be honest it’ll probably wind up green.

The trim has been reattached to our original window and door. I nearly had a panic attack watching one of the contractors going at it on my century old wood with the nail gun but it all went fine and looks great.

That drawer with no handle is the wrong colour and is going to be replaced with a better match so, no need to point out to me that it doesn’t match, hah. It sticks out like a sore thumb.

There’s just so much counter space in here. I keep going in and standing in front of the passthrough and rubbing my hands over the counter in a pantomime of kneading bread. I can’t wait to knead bread here.

Here’s a closeup of my bread kneading spot. We chose this quartz countertop because it looks like terrazzo.

We have upper cabinets. Behold our glorious gold. It’s not quite that 70s Harvest Gold, but definitely references it. This whole space will be very 1970s-adjacent once our near-avocado backsplash is in. Here’s a tour of the progress moving clockwise from the doorway (the doorway to the current kitchen, as the one to the new dining room is still blocked off with plywood).

This is the enclosure for the fridge. The left side will be filled in to push the fridge out from the wall a bit. That cabinet up top is enormous and has tray dividers on one side.

You can see on the upper right there how warped our original plaster walls are. All of these cabinets will have trim on the top that extends them to the ceiling. I don’t mind the look of a gap there but it’s sure going to be nice not to have to clean it.

The hole in the wall will have tile extending up the sides from the backsplash, and a quartz sill.

Now we can really get a sense of how sort of weird the original trim on the window will look with the lighter colour of the wood cabinets. Our designer, Markie Tuckett of Timber + Plumb (link: Timber + Plumb) would have preferred to refinish the old trim to match, which probably would have looked beautiful, but I want to keep it the same as the other rooms and insisted it go down as one of those “client quirks”. Ditto for the totally trashed original oak floor, which we may still refinish some day, but not today.

There’s our beautiful open shelf with the gold cabinet and birch shelves and back. This is where my antique Crown jars full of spices will go. Being able to mix my spices right next to the stove feels like the height of luxury.

Opposite that is our very tall pantry, with roll-out drawers in the bottom section. The narrow top part looks a little strange, and we lost a good deal of capacity to make room for the open shelving on the side that I insisted on, but the whole thing is so deep there’s still at least six times the space we had in our old pantry. And our Japanese stacking coffee mugs from the 1960s are going to look so good on these open shelves.

Behold, our cabinets! It’s a good thing we also emptied out our living room as part of this job, because there wasn’t going to be anywhere else to store these.

I skipped over the part where the drywall got finished and primed, because I couldn’t stand to take so many lifeless white-on-white photos. The ceiling in the living room above was replaced as part of this job, and the wall whose doorway got closed off was totally redone, and our contractors went above and beyond by also filling the major cracks in the rest of the original plaster and primed the entire room! No more of that joy killing beige that we haven’t changed in the 20 years since we bought that house. It’s well beyond time this room got painted in a colour we’ve chosen ourselves.

And here are the lower cabinets installed, all ready for templating the countertops.

The space where there’s no drawer is where the microwave oven will live, with its own electrical outlet. Next to that, where the cabinets seem a bit lower, is the slot that will house a nice big pull-out butcher block that we’re going to commission a friend’s woodworker son to make for us.

And here’s the sink cabinet and the beside-the-stove cabinet, where for the first time since we moved to Windsor 22 years ago we’re going to have a junk drawer! Friends, I have quite a lot of junk. Also, the original kitchen in this house has no drawers. We had to shove two dressers in there just to have places to put things.

It’s funny how a room feels bigger as soon as you start putting stuff in it.

We have walls. That unfinished mess of uneven drywall and original plaster, left behind when we had the addition (visible through that plastic draped doorway) put on, is finally about to be integrated into a seamless wall again.

Someday we won’t remember there was ever fake brick here. This corner is where the pantry cupboard will go, and the built in bench (next to the plywood covered doorway).

Farewell, elegantly rounded doorway that we loved. You’re on to bigger and better things.

The living room ceiling is in.

It’s slowly starting to look like a room again in here.

Our kitchen has a ceiling! And it’s NOT STUCCO.

Our living room is also getting a new not-stucco ceiling as part of this job. We found out when the ceiling came down that there’s no subfloor upstairs, just beams with a floor on top and a ceiling below and a bunch of empty space in between, which explains a lot re: privacy in this house. Here’s a buffer insulation being put in so that you’ll soon be able to visit us and go upstairs to the washroom safe in the knowledge that nobody in the living room can hear you pee.

Cozifying.