When we sold our last house it was very bitter-sweet.  For seven years we poured everything we had into the house—blood, sweat, and tears quite literally. We slowly finished parts of one room and would almost immediately jump onto parts of another, never completing one single room until the very end when we decided to put it on the market. It had less to do with our attention spans and more to do with our needs—when water starts pouring down your back stairs, you tend to devote a bit more of your resources to the problem at hand.

Our new house is drastically different than our previous one. We are also different than we were in our previous house; we are older, have a baby, and our style has started to become a bit more… well… us. The best part of buying a new house was being able to take what we learned in the past and apply it to a new project.  Plus, I’m obsessed with houses, so I really enjoy any amount of rehabbing, decorating, planning, and/or designing when it comes to my home.

While we are in no way finished with the house, we are almost finished with the kitchen.  And.  I.  Love.  It.  We still want shelves over the stove (love open shelving, especially when filled with things that warm-up a room… make it feel lived in), and need to finish up some painting and small odds-and-ends, but here’s where we are now:

I’d say the kitchen was a moderate-budget kitchen.  We splurged on a few things, but I don’t regret a penny that we spent. The dishwasher and oven are from IKEA, as are the cabinets that we sanded down and painted. We also bought them all during their kitchen sale so we ended up saving a good amount. The floors we redid ourselves (err… Nathan and his brother did), and I love them.  It was questionable what was underneath the three layers of flooring but we lucked out and they were in great shape!

The main splurge was the SMEG refrigerator, which although it is small, makes me happy every time I see it. It was one of the biggest headaches to order (they are advertised as being available to quickly deliver through Sears, but we did not find that to be the case and while they confirmed three different delivery dates, we didn’t get it until three months after those dates had come and passed.  It was worth it though.  Look at that little guy!  Adorable!  I feel it is necessary to point out that we do have an old refrigerator in the basement where we keep things we don’t use every day.

The other thing we splurged on were the three pendant lights.  These are really more beautiful in person.  Really.  They are made from translucent bone china and give off the most intimate warm glow, so day or night they are really pleasant to look at.  I highly recommend these (they are from DWR and are on-sale now).

In our previous house we used tractor-trailer flooring (new, not used) for our counter-tops. It was a really inexpensive way to have butcher-block-ish counters (i.e., bottom photo found here) but we didn’t plane them down like we should have and they were a bit uneven. This time we went with marble.

All the major stuff is done now, but there are small things that we probably won’t get to for a very long time… i.e., the shelves we want above the stove (see way below, where the picture is hung a bit too high), the piece of trim that goes below the stove and above the oven (see below), missing paint on one of the side-cabinet doors, and a few places in the floor where there are tiny holes from old outlets (we had new electric and plumbing put in).

The missing piece mentioned above might not be all that noticeable to everyone, but it’s there…  See it?  It’s right there above the oven… Right.  There.  It’s small though, and I can live with it never being replaced now that I’ve lived through one entire, constant-in-progress renovation.  It’s really nice to have the bulk of the room done.

Here’s what it looked liked when we first bought the house back in the Spring (2010):

And then after we gutted it:

And now, where the shelves will soon be: