So many ideas...so little time!

I have so many ideas floating around in my head for our home.... there is never time to "do" anything though! For instance after seeing one woman's awesome remodeling in a cottage style, I knew I wanted to start focusing on more detail oriented stuff. I have not liked our molding from the moment we moved into our house, and dh hasn't either...though he could live with it. (He could live with anything, if you ask me). Anyway, today I mentioned to dh that I wanted us to replace all the trim around the doors and windows. His response to me.....

"I'll show you how to use the miter saw..." Ha! Very funny. :-) So I found out that the cottage look I want to add to the windows and doors doesn't even require a miter cut...Cool that should be easier!

Anyway, I was thinking to myself that our current home is definitely not a fixer upper as our first home was. It's pretty decent and liveable, but I am desiring to make it more "mine". Do you know what I mean? This home has all the paint decor etc from the previous owner, and I like it, but I just want some more of me in there. Sometimes I still feel like I'm living in her house, and we've been here almost a year. So the renovations will be starting just as soon as baseball season is over. And for those of you who have kids in baseball, you know what I am talking about!

Back to my musings on our non-fixer upper. Well it led me to go back and find pictures of our old house, and post some of them on here. Our old house was a 70's style decor that was dark and awful. Here is a photo of the kitchen cabinets from when we first bought it.



The face fronts had a crisscross pattern routed into them with a diamond in the middle in a peach color. In the middle of the diamond were these awful brass knockers. The backsplash was that hard linoleum like stuff in a peachy yellow. The peninsula was hand built by the previous owner with scraps of leftover wood. It was the worst construction!

This is a photo of our kitchen right before we sold the house. Had we stayed, hardwood floors were definitely going in there. But since we were moving, we left it as it was. The new owner put hardwood in anyway....which I was happy about!



The wall color is called Toasted Almond by American traditions at Lowes. (I think it's American Traditions) The color on the cabinets is called creamy by Sherwin Williams. That color took forever for me to find. I had those cabinets painted (22 of them!) and when I was done the color I had chosen was a bit too yellow. I tried to work with it, but dh knows me, and said "Jackie, you are not going to be happy until you re-paint those". I chose the Creamy color after looking and debating a LONG time. We filled the routing on the cabinets with a hard expoxy, and then put a skim coat of mud on them, to smooth them out. It was the most economical way to get flat front cabinets without buying new. (Which we couldn't afford). Instead of applying a varnish to seal them (they would yellow), we sprayed them with an acrylic clear coat spray and they wiped down beautifully! DH built the island and we bought that laminate top to match what we already had, again because of cost.

I still love to look at that kitchen!