Family Room Changes and Update

We finally got some good weather and our house is making some progress!

Isn't it a little sad that THIS is progress?? In case you are new to my blog, you'll have to go back and read this post to understand why we have no roof.

I'm so ready for the "good" stuff! Not this boring, oh you need a roof stuff. Whatever.

Here's a look back at what was once a livable family room.

  Other than a roof, we are making some other changes in here.  The dark beams you see are the load bearing beams covered in a faux worm wood type material. These are the beams that were hit by the tree. Our contractor/builder is redoing the load bearing beams and they will be hidden under the sheetrock. I do however love the look of exposed beams, so we will be doing faux beams hopefully similiar to the ones below.

We will also be adding planking to the ceiling in between the faux beams and adding skylights. The decision of how many skylights and how big are being determined tomorrow.

The fireplace will look the same as before. All the planking on the top half will be rebuilt, and my husband is overjoyed it doesn't have to be him to rebuild it. We will be putting a tv above the fireplace and moving the clock somewhere else. Our tv was in the little bookshelf to the left of the fireplace before and we are limited on the size the tv can be there. This way we can get a much larger tv for this room. I also will be adding a white mantle to the fireplace instead of the wood beam.

A few other changes...

Remember this bar that I designed and my husband built for one of my One Room Challenges? Well, it is now gone.

Honestly, I'm a little sad about it being gone because I thought it was cute and it did come in need when entertaining. It however drove me nuts and my husband as well that it was designed in the room as just this box protruding from the wall. It felt awkward to us, so we thought while in the midst of all this tear down this was the time to do something about it.

I will be changing up the decor just a little bit as well. Most of the things above are already in my room. My plans are to add those new leather stools from Pottery Barn. Our ceiling fan was damaged and I might possibly replace it with the beautiful beaded chandelier from Pottery Barn instead. My mirror above our console was damaged too, so I may be adding something like the round rattan mirror from Serena & Lily as well as the striped rug from Serena & Lily since we will be replacing our trashed carpet with hardwood floors that match the kitchen.

That about concludes my family room plans. I'm sure there will be some changes and maybe obstacles that will come up along the way of rebuilding. Some of my kitchen plans have already changed and I will do another update on that soon.

If you like to follow along with our rebuild, be sure not to miss a post by following my page on Facebook, Instagram, Bloglovin, or add yourself to my email list.

Until next time...

Kitchen Plans aka My Silver Lining

A new kitchen is something I've been dreaming about since we received keys to our new home 15 years ago! Lots of dogeared magazines, many pins of kitchens on Pinterest, and the time is finally here. Gulp!

Have you ever been in this situation where you finally are able to attack a project that you've been dreaming about for so long, and now that it is here you freak that you aren't sure about the choices you have made? Well, that's me.right.now.

There are definitely some ideas that I know FOR SURE that I want without question but others, I'm like teetering on and hope I'm choosing the right choice.

Here are my ideas as of now....

 A rough draft sketch of the layout.

 Then we took our plans to Lowe's and they put it out on this 3D scale. Again rough idea, not completely the same as what it will look like but similar. It depends on which oven I choose, and if it has a down draft, I won't have the hood that I sketched in above, and the island should be longer. I am hoping it will fit at least 5 chairs.

 A look back at what it looked like before. As you can see, very 80's oak cabinets, with that one upper that was at eye level and you couldn't carry on good conversation with anyone that was seated in the kitchen eating area (below the chandelier). From the plans above you will see we are eliminating the eating area and we will no longer have a kitchen table in there. We will plan to use the island to eat our informal meals and the stairs that you see going up in the back of the second photo is our formal dining room that we will use when we have company or when we want to sit around a table and not at the island. I love that this plan will open up the space so much more and I will have so much more working/prepping space that I didn't have before. In this old kitchen everything was so choppy with the cooktop in center on one area and the sink in the middle of the other and a small area next to the refrigerator. There wasn't a lot of space to spread out.

Also, you know when you have a get together and everyone hangs out in the kitchen, with this old layout it was very confined to the u shape area and felt cramped, or people were on the other side where you couldn't see them very well because of that upper cabinet.
Needless to say, I'm very excited about the new layout.

This is a little "mood" board that I created for the kitchen.

 This reflects my idea to have 2 windows flanking the the stove in the center of the long wall.

 Thinking one or 2 of these for above my island.

 I haven't gotten to the point where I've actually had to pick out my countertops yet, but I will be doing some black honed granite or quartz on outer cabinets and a "marble" like quartz on the island.

 My island counter height chairs that I'm debating. I am pretty sure I'm going with the top one for 3 reasons, 1. they are cheaper of the two, 2. they are just like the ones we had in my kitchen growing up, 3. I am adding a leather chair and stools to the adjoining family room and feel it might be too much leather. 

 We got a pretty ridiculous deal on a used Sub Zero fridge. It is a paneled one and we will have our cabinet maker make new panels to match our new cabinets, and paint them white of course.

 We have an allowance from the insurance company to fix some of the damaged hardwoods in the kitchen area and refinish, and I would LOVE to lighten the heck out of them. I love this look so much. These are I'm guessing white oak and my floors are red oak, so I'm pretty sure I can't get this exact look but I'm going to try. Some people might say this is a fad/trend of going with light floors but I'm not choosing it because it's trendy, I'm choosing it because I love this look.

Our ceilings will be redone obviously. (if you don't know why I am saying obviously, you need to go back and read my last two posts) You can see in my above before photos, we had large exposed beams on our ceiling and while I love exposed beams, I wasn't in love with the dark worm wood material that wrapped the beams. Our contractor is redoing the ceiling to conceal the beams under the sheetrock, but since I love the look of beams, we will be adding faux beams and will be painting them white as the photo above. The plan is also to have planking in between the beams and a few skylights in the kitchen and adjoining family room. This will bring in so much more character and texture to the two rooms, and more natural light that is much needed in this area of the house.

This is my basic plans right now. We are still in a stalled position right now since we are waiting for clear days to do the next step of rebuilding which is opening up and redoing the roof. Sadly I don't see really any clear days in our near future, so this might take awhile.

To maybe clear up some questions you might have, like why are you getting a new kitchen when it looks like there wasn't any damage to your cabinets or to the kitchen really at all?

 Where the tree in lying above the three windows is our family room which is connected to the kitchen, which are the two windows to the left. The impact of the tree pushed that wall out from 90 degree angle to about 70 degree angle.You can't tell that from the photo, and believe me none of the photos even come close to how bad the house really was/is damaged. The people that come to our house and see it in person have been shocked and say the photos really didn't do it any justice.

To fix the misalignment, the sheetrock and insulation all had to be removed thus the cabinets would have to be removed. The cabinets actually had come apart from the wall in certain areas and were coming apart from each other in other areas. Our insurance company deemed the kitchen a loss because we would not be able to take cabinets apart to get to fixing the wall and possibly re-framing and put the cabinets back together.

We received money to go towards new cabinets and new countertops based on our old cabinets. The costs that will deal with the switching of the layout of the kitchen and any upgrades past what we've been compensated for will be on our own dime. This was definitely without a doubt NOT how I wanted to get my kitchen remodel. If I had a choice of not having a tree fall on our house (and possibly being scarred for life) and no remodel versus the tree falling/new kitchen, I would choose no tree/no remodel. It happened though and this is just a sweet silver lining out of it all.

This was a lot longer of a post that I had anticipated. I will post our family room plans soon. If you have any questions feel free to ask away.

Until next time. 

Broken House Update

It's been awhile since I've blogged and thought I'd give you a little update on what I'm calling our Broken House.

If you missed what happened to our house in November and don't follow me on Instagram. You can read my last post here.

It's been almost 3 months since a tree fell on our house, and here is where we are today.

 

 

Not a lot of progress in those 3 months. I will dive into all of what's happened in those last 3 months later. I will also be giving tips on what to do to protect yourself in cases like this and tips on making your life easier with dealing with your insurance company in case of fire, theft, or let's say a tree falling on your house. Our insurance company has been great so far and the delay is not the fault of them or our contractor, it's just the whole darn process which I will dive into in a later post I promise. I have lots of tips to share for sure but I pray no one has to go through what we've gone through.

Let's take a little look back at what it looked like before.

 

The silver lining in all of this is I'm FINALLY getting my new kitchen that I've been dreaming of for the last almost 15 years since we've lived here. You can see in the above photos how cut off the kitchen was with that horizontal cupboard blocking any vision into the family area. I've got big plans for these two rooms and I will post those ideas/plans on another post, that I swear won't take another 2 months to post.

Hope you'll follow along with me on the rebuilding process! I will be more good about posting more frequently so you'll see the up to date progress, but to be fair there wasn't any progress to talk about until now. I'll be back soon!