This is one of those "putting yourself out there" moments.  :)   Did you know that I have an Etsy shop?  Yes.  Oh, yes. I do.

It's very eclectic at the moment.  Full of hand painted wooden signs and custom designed birth announcements.  I really love making all of these beautiful unique pieces - it's therapeutic in a way for me to work with the wood to bring out something gorgeous.  Each of the wooden art pieces is made from reclaimed pallet wood and then hand painted by me. No stencils, no cookie cutter process - each piece is completely unique and completely fashioned by yours truly.  

COMMENTS:

I have commenting turned off for this blog, but I would love for you to venture into my Instagram (@polishthenest) to catch up with and chat with me there!!  XOXO

Ok, so putting this out there for the universe:  I am officially dedicating 1 hour each day to working on this blog.  This is like one of those support groups where you SAY it, and then because you've actually told people, you'll follow through.  Right?!?

If you follow me on Instagram, you've noticed that we've been renovating our Kitchen for quite some time.   Not to sound like one of those crime shows, but imagine a "dun dun" and then THIS IS THE STORY OF OUR KITCHEN.

4 years ago we bought this house.  Scroll back through to this post and see how truly disgusting it was when we bought it.  I mean... YUCK.  But it had good bones!!! lol..

Because we were on a major time crunch with renovation, I was planning on reusing some of those existing cabinets and just painting them to get by until I could spend some time designing the kitchen of my dreams.  On day 5 of the renovation, my father in law was removing those old cabinets from the kitchen only to find out that they were not salvageable.  They were water logged from burst pipes, and the person who installed them did so with about 30,000 brad nails.  

On that day, I walked in from a Home Depot trip when my lovely husband looked at me and said "We need a kitchen in 3 weeks. Go down to the Kitchen Design Center right now and pick out a new kitchen."  I took the dimensions and walked my stunned butt down to the Center.

4 hours later I had ordered an entirely new kitchen.

Let me clue you into this:  All of this happened BEFORE Pinterest was a thing.  And so I did what any good woman would do and I picked out a cookie cutter kitchen of cream cabinets and a dark island and called it a day.   3 weeks later, my cabinets were delivered and installed and I was left with this:



Pretty, right? 

 It's a classic kitchen for a family of 4.  I loved that there was seating around that Island, the backsplash was TO DIE FOR, and I loved the storage options.

In theory.

We lived in this gorgeous kitchen for 4 years.  I will admit that it's lovely.  A showstopper.  But somehow, it just wasn't jiving with me.

It was on about year 3 where I noticed a few things:

1.. I had empty cabinets.  What, you say? Empty cabinets.  I am not a hoarder. I do not own multiple copies of any one thing, and so I had empty cabinets.

2.  No one ever used our dining room. Like, EVER.  Everyone always crammed around this island with it's 4 little seats.  Did I mention that my husband is one of 4 kids?  Sunday dinners usually end up to be about 15 people. Minimum.  15 Polish people gathered around this island while I was trying to navigate the oven.  Good times.

3.  I literally never ever EVER used that Island to prepare food.  I have a thing about preparing food on the same surface on which I am going to eat it.  That big granite island was a gorgeous spot for buffet style dining and wrapping gifts.

4.  The island was too big.  In theory, ON PAPER, this island was perfect. Any woman would love that, right?  But, sadly, NO.  In this space, it needed to be a smidge smaller to accommodate people in the kitchen at the same time.  If someone was sitting in that black stool, you couldn't get in to the refrigerator.  It became frustrating for me.

5.  The ceilings in our kitchen are just a little over 6.5 feet tall.  You read that correctly.  Short ceilings in the 200 year old house.  The upper cabinetry always made it feel more like a coffin to me.

So, upon percolating and really evaluating our family and our needs, I decided - much to my husbands chagrin - that I would renovate a portion of our newly renovated kitchen.  The plan was to remove the upper cabinets and free up the visual space.  Most of them were empty anyway, so it really wasn't much of a hassle.  Then, the island would be removed and replaced with -  GASP - a longer, skinnier kitchen table that could accommodate our enormous extended family at a moment's notice.  

That was the plan.

We removed the uppers in a morning and after  a day and a half, and one almost divorce later, we were left with this:

We left the backsplash as is and simply planked the remaining walls with 1/4" underlayment that we ripped down to 6" planks.  The worst part of this project was painting it!  At this point, I knew I was on the right track with this kitchen. It instantly felt more open and bigger.

The first project I wanted to complete before I tackled that Island was a little bit of open storage. I didn't want to cram a ton of open shelves into my newly breathable space, so I opted to fill one corner with shelving.  This shelving was super simple to assemble using basic wood pieces and 5/8" all thread.  I will have to create another post on how awesome and durable all thread is for shelving.  Also - it's ridiculously cheap!

So, with all of that in the past, I was left with the Island removal.  Honestly, this is the part of the project that received the most angst and disagreement from my better half. He was nervous about the removal of the island, how we would move it, and if we would regret the decision in the end. Many heated discussions and some Photoshopping later, I was fortunate enough to find (on Craigslist) a family who was building a home and needed a new island.  They hired their own movers and after about 90 minutes of work, I was left with no Kitchen Island.  It was a win-win for us because my husband didn't have to do it, and I was left with a little bit of cash to pay for the new fixtures I wanted for my renovation!  Yay!!

So that is the story!  The after pics are all that's left.  :)

Just to give a little comparison from the day we purchased the house to today:

Pretty great, right?

So after all of this beautiful work, I'm left with a solution to all of the problems listed first.  Instead of empty cabinets, I have gorgeous artwork and useful shelving.  We have only the things that we use, and the best part is that all of those things are pretty!  Our kitchen no longer feels like a coffin to me - the ceiling feels a million feet higher.  We eliminated our dining room altogether and opted for this beautiful table that can extend to a glorious 108" to accommodate our family.  It's also skinnier and so there is a lot more breathing room in this kitchen.

When I walk into my home, I want to breathe a huge sigh of "love this house".  And now, when I come home each day into this kitchen, I do.

I hope you'll stay with me as I make the rest of our home match this room.  ;)

~~Jessica






COMMENTS:

I have commenting turned off for this blog, but I would love for you to venture into my Instagram (@polishthenest) to catch up with and chat with me there!!  XOXO

I don't know about you, but my kids are headed back to school on Monday. With that comes a lot of chaos, paperwork, early mornings, more paperwork and the daily rush to find everything they need for school.  This year, I'm ON TOP OF IT.  Last year, every day they would come home, kick off their shoes into a pile by the door, drop their coats where they stood and throw their backpacks into a corner. The next morning we would spend extra time looking for missing shoes, gloves, pencils and generally everything they ditched when they walked in.  NOT THIS YEAR!!

Please allow me to introduce you to my kid closet.  I think I'll name her Penelope.

It's a cabinet that I purchased at an estate sale a few years ago for less than $50.  She's about to be a new best friend to my daughters and my sanity:

It's a strange thing - having to go from a nursery decorated room to (seemingly overnight) a room fit for a teenager.  But that's what happened!  Our daughter is 11 and one morning I was sitting in my kitchen when she gingerly approached me with a simple request:  "Mommy, I want a teenage room."  And I was seriously floored.  When did she grow up!?!  She went further:  "I want it to be black and white and pink, and I want a chair that hangs from the ceiling."

And so there it was.  The colors, the ideas... it was all planned in her head.  My job was to get over my mommy shock and execute a beautiful bedroom for her on a budget.  

Her room isn't large.  Maybe 12x11?  So, when we started planning this, she was set on having bunk beds.  A space for her friends (or her sister) to sleep over.  And there was the beginning of our plan.  When I looked at bunk beds, I realized very quickly that I wasn't willing to spend $1500 on a bunk bed that I actually liked, and the metal ones just weren't in my style frame.  Improvising was a total necessity in this venture.  

Off I went to Ikea.  We bought one unfinished Mydal bunk bed for a  whopping $159.   We happened to have two twin mattresses, so this was the cheapest way to maneuver my little girls tween dream.  And so, we were left with this:

And it's boring, but here's her closet wall.  Her doors are black and we are still working on a paper flower art display for the wall to the right of the closet.  

Another snippet of our house! The master bath is something that we know we're lucky to have in the area we live in. Most houses in this area are 1 bathroom houses and so when we found this house with a MASTER?  At a decent price?  We were stoked!

Realistically, the master bathroom was the only room in the house that didn't need anything but a coat of paint. The floors were ok, the walls in good shape and while the color choices weren't my first choice, I could live with them until the time came when I had the money to demo and renovate.

We have these beautiful old pedestal sinks. They really are pretty.  HOWEVER, no storage. zip. nada. no place to put your toothbrush!  Hard to see, but I added a tiny Ikea shelf to the right of the window sink to hold our toothbrushes.  Not the most ideal situation design wise, but at least we have somewhere to sit something.  Unfortunately these sinks aren't conducive to counter space - the soap bottles have a hard time balancing because of the grooves in the actual sink for a bar of soap.  Who uses a bar of soap any more?!?

If you turn to the left, you can see our shower.  The doorway to enter the bath is to the right of this dresser.  So, this massive dresser - which houses my hair dryer, all the girly essentials and my husband's stuff, extra towels, etc is kind of not a great solution because the side of it is the first thing you see when you walk into the bathroom and it's big.  too big.  The shower was a plain shower with forest green tile and clear glass doors. We have two daughters who have no sense of privacy, so in order to give my husband some modesty, I installed this window film on the outside of the glass (I bought it at 2jane).  It works to provide the right amount of privacy for the person showering.  Ideally, I want a bigger shower that has a little more privacy and a different prettier tile.  

This is the other side of the bathroom (to take this photo, I'm standing in the doorway - see how close that dresser is?!).  We have a lovely room in which our toilet has been cornered.  It's a true "throne" room and I do NOT feel like a princess when I go into this room.  In fact, I feel like I'm on display.  It's not a good plan.  If you're building a house, do not do this.  It's a no-no.   I added a random shelf to the wall with hooks for towels and robes.  That's the only towel storage we have.  And you can see the floor is not horrible - not my favorite, but not horrible.  

To the right, you can see the entry to our master closet. We spent the money and outfitted this room with tall Ikea closet system and it.is.fabulous. Best decision ever. I also had our gorgeous hardwoods put into the closet.  Love that.