Cook House Remodel: Foyer, Hallway, and Stairs

Because Georgia’s nursery and Wyatt’s bedrooms are upstairs, we knew now was the best time to tackle our stairway. We love that our house was so very well-built but the decor is dated to say the least. The pink cast iron railing, hunter green walls, and yellow/green carpet had been past its prime for decades I am sure.

     

Our idea was that the green paint was livable if we could just remove the carpet, retread the stairs, and paint the railing. And then this happened:

The ceiling fan (dated but okay for the time being) began to pull down out of the ceiling. We were scared that one day it would just crash on someone’s head. The only way to reach the 18’ wiring was to rent scaffolding. At that point, we decided to go ahead and paint the walls with a fresh coat of paint since we didn’t want to have to rent it twice. Our stair project was quickly growing into a multi-area project.

During:

Just removing the railing made a huge difference immediately! With the railing out of the way, Justin started in on changing out the light in the foyer and painting the walls a deep red color.

 

After the painting was done, Justin started ripping out carpet, carpet strips, and the stair treads. We had to start literally from the ground up.

 

He and his daddy got the stairs treads routed, installed, and ready for stain. I simultaneously repainted the hunter green front door a rich, glossy black.

 

I am a terrible decision maker when it comes to paint colors, stains, furniture, etc. We ended up buying eight sample pots of stain before deciding on a color.

 

Thankfully Justin is a patient man. He got the stairs conditioned and stained and reinstalled fairly easily.

 

Here’s where the project grew yet again. Justin decided while we were ripping up the stair carpet, we might as well rip out the hall carpet since it was all connected basically. At a little less than 100 square feet, we opted to get white pine tongue-and-groove flooring and stain it to match while we were working on the stairs. I took days and days of Justin nailing, cleaning, wiping, staining, and sealing. He was working on that hard floor on his knees for hours on end. It really was the best decision and the floors turned out perfectly.

   

He sealed the floors with polyurethane and meticulously applied the sealer to the stairs and risers as well.

Both railings got a fresh coat of hammered bronze paint. It took four folks to bring them back in and reinstall them. These cast iron railings are well-built too but they aren’t light for sure!

     

After the railing install and adding trim and shoe molding to the stairs, Justin got it all caulked up and repainted. The before and after shots are just amazing to me and it’s even more impressive in person! I am glad I have a handy husband that is willing and able to tackle such huge projects.

September Yard Work

Yes, I know it’s mid-November but I have been just so busy with everything else that I have neglected this blog for over two months.

Back in September, Justin and I both took an entire week off of work to do some much needed improvements. We were able to rip out these massive overgrown azaleas. I like azaleas—for the two weeks a year they bloom. Otherwise, they are just a nuisance and get in my way.

We also cleared out this ivy ground cover and bushy jasmine around our pergola. We planted plugs of St. Augustine grass from our lawn. I hope this will be a nice squishy place for our kids to play instead of the snake-ridden (my worst fear!) no-man’s land it used to be.

We also burned off the garden and prepared it for the winter crops. We eventually planted collards, greens, broccoli, cabbage, and some sugar cane.

 

 

Dry Kitchen?

Recently we detailed the transformation of our dining room. We have really been at a loss of what to call the new room. It’s more than a pantry, but canning kitchen seems to ignore the fact that the room is so versatile. A fellow blogger made a “dry kitchen” in her basement as an entertainment space for small group gatherings. I think that is going to be the best moniker we will be able to use for this room. It has all the amenities of a kitchen without the plumbing and appliances—that is until we buy an upright freezer and get it installed!

Here are some small decorating changes we have made. We have found that we are actually more limited on wall space that we originally anticipated and we keep finding really neat stuff for that room.

I found this adorable butcher print cow cutout at JoAnn’s craft store one day and snatched it up. I really wish they had more than just cows. Justin and I think we are going to do prints or vinyl butcher prints of all the animals we eat and frame them up somehow.

 

Amanda and Michael have been renovating their kitchen and they gave us this wood shelf. It’s perfect for all of the canned items we accumulate. These are the 50 cans of potatoes Justin has canned over the past month and the strawberry jam we made!

 

I saw this on Pinterest one day, texted it to Justin, and he bought all of the parts and had it made within hours. I love that about him!

Justin smoked the first of his three hams and we got it hanging up in its muslin sack. I was actually afraid it would smell smoky in there but it doesn’t!

 

Daddy and Justin salvaged this amazing cart from a building that was being torn down in Ashburn. It is AMAZING! We worked off Amanda and Michael’s kitchen renovation again and got the scrap of butcher block that came from cutting out their sink. I love the character and the fact that I’ve not seen anything else like it. We actually have the ham hung under the countertop on it now.

 

This is my latest find for the dry kitchen. These are old sign inserts from a grocery store. They can be moved around if stores change their layouts. I snagged them up for $4 each at Pickin’ Peanuts in Ashburn. We haven’t hung them yet. We are still waiting to finalize the layout of the room when we install the upright freezer. I like the idea of hanging them vertically on the wall, but Justin also thought about hanging them from the ceiling. I like it because I was able to sort through all of the sign inserts and get out the signs for stuff we actually keep in the dry kitchen!

Dining Room Transformation

   

This is our “dining” room in our house before we moved it. It was a formal space with no storage but very nicely composed. When we moved it, it became a dumping ground for all of the stuff we didn’t have room for in the kitchen. Mrs. Desiree gave us her old china cabinet, which is wonderful, but it isn’t the ideal storage for large platters and crystal serving ware I have accumulated over the years.

Also, the peach walls clash with the yellow-green carpet from days gone by. Even my short self cracks my head into the low hanging chandelier when I walk through. It was designed to be hung over a dining room table, so height wasn’t an issue. Unfortunately, we have never pulled the trigger and purchased a formal dining set.

Justin and I are nothing if not practical. We appreciate working together in the kitchen on various projects and even our spacious countertops get cluttered with kitchen appliances, decorative doo-dads, and snacks. We decided to be more practical than formal and convert our dining room into a butler’s pantry/secondary kitchen.

I picked out a beautiful sea glass blue-green at Lowe’s and got a tester pot made. When I got home I quickly realized that my blue-green was plain old baby blue in the room. I quickly went back to Lowe’s and picked out four varying shades of green. We decided to go darker than we initially wanted.

We are ripping out the dated carpet and staining the underlying concrete floors a rich chocolate brown with green undertones so this should have  been perfect. Jalapeño Pepper Jelly turned out to be our favorite color, which is really ironic since I have worked with two pepper jelly producers at work!

These colors show up a little dark since I was working at night and snapping iPhone photos. I am impressed with the color so far and this is just a first coat.

 

 

I’ve had a few people tell me they love our chandelier. It is beautiful we replaced it for a more practical option. I scored this light at our favorite thrift store (3rd Street Thrift Store in Tifton) for $12.84! It is normally $120 at Home Depot. I wanted track lighting and lots of it but Justin is definitely opposed to it. I am of the sort that believes you can never have too much lighting when you’re cooking.

 

After Justin and my father-in-law Sheldon installed two new outlets (there were none previously!), Justin taped off all of the trim and gave it a bright extra-white glossy coat. We even taped out each individual pane of glass in the French doors. It really made it worth the effort. Everything looked so much cleaner.

 

  

After the paint on the trim and doors was dry, we rolled up the carpet and carpet pad.

Justin spent the next day ripping out carpet tack strips and linoleum. He sprayed on the recommended etching agent that was supposed to open the pores of the concrete up to accept the stain we selected. When that didn’t seem to have any effect, he also spent the majority of the day on his hands and knees with the metal hand-held grinder powered by our air compressor trying to remove the remnants of carpet and linoleum glue. It didn’t work and we broke down and tried this solvent and sweeping compound from Home Depot. This stuff got carpet pad remnants and the glue off but it wouldn’t touch the linoleum glue.

 

After that, we moved on to plan D: we bought muriatic acid from Sherwin Williams. Aside from the awful chemical-filled air despite having several box fans, the muriatic acid didn’t even make a difference. It definitely cleaned the concrete, but it didn’t etch the surface like it was supposed to for our semi-transparent stain to sink in.

 

Apparently our final option was to drive all the way to Valdosta and rent a concrete orbital sander but the risks of creating gouges, cost, and time were all too much for us. We decided after four failed attempts to just throw in the towel and give up the dream of stained concrete floors.

 

Instead I rushed back to Sherwin Williams with only 20 minutes to spare before they closed. Thankfully they were having a big 40% off paint sale. I bought their floor and porch enamel—one gallon of darker brown and one quart of a lighter shade. The first coat was down quickly and I was quite pleased with it.

Justin had the best idea to add a subtle stripe around the edge of the wall and then again around the island. We added a stripe of the lighter color about 1 foot into the room. After that dried completely, we taped off the floors with painters tape. I then went over the lighter color with the original floor color, first over just the light brown and removing the painters tape while it was still wet and then again over the entire center space of the floor.

   

After the floor paint cured for a few days, Justin brought in the island and repeated the same process of the stripes. He also had to touch up some of the dark brown color where it hadn’t fully cured and was damaged by the appliance dolly he used.

 

We let that paint cure again and followed up with two coats of wet look sealer. We then let the floor cure for four or five more days before we were comfortable loading everything back in.

 

Remember back in economic 101 when your professor said, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”?  The island was given to my dad when some locals were remodeling their kitchen. It ended up not working out for Mama and Daddy to use it in the new house they were building so they gave it to us for our project.

We were feeling the pain of “no free lunch” when we had such incredible difficulty finding a countertop for our 6’ x 3’ island as close to cheap as possible. Home Depot gave us a rough estimate of $500-$800 dollars and butcher block countertops weren’t looking very frugal either. My budget for DIY is always preferably free, which is not practical at all in times like this. Lo and behold, we managed to do the impossible. Justin’s dad had almost an entire sheet of stainless steel in his shop he said we could have. Justin took it to a local metal shop in Cordele and they cut it to size and bent the edges down (no pointy corners!) for $50! We ended up with the perfect surface countertop for an amazing price.

Here it is in all of its glory. The baker’s racks are loaded up, the peg board is hung with care, and we have officially broken it in with Wyatt’s 4th birthday party!

 

   

We still have a little bit of wall art to hang and some vinyl to apply to the walls, but I am so happy it’s done!