Hey friends! If you were following along with me on Instagram Stories a couple weekends ago, you would’ve seen that Mike and I were doing some home improvements.
We’re coming up on a year of owning our home! If you’re not familiar with our house-buying journey, ours was super wild. We found the home online September 27th of 2017, toured the house on 29th, got pre-approved overnight (literally), put in an offer on 30th, the seller accepted the next day, a few days later we were in contract, and then we qualified for a fast-track closing. Talk about crazy! That kind of stuff never happens, right? We were simply blessed!
When we first got into the house, we painted all of the rooms except for the downstairs bathroom and did some minor improvements like new shoe molding. We had a lot we wanted to change about the home but that all requires lots of money and time, haha. Our kitchen was easily our least favorite part of the house. It’s small and the previous owner who attempted to flip it did a really poor job. The cabinets were also the worst brown color ever.
Our kitchen, dining, and sitting room areas are pretty much all one space. The kitchen and dining had very cheap flooring and the sitting room part had carpet. This past year, the flooring in the kitchen/dining became awful – it was lifting up in some parts and simply just needed to be redone.
So, this past weekend we were finally able to put all new vinyl flooring in the entire space and we also repainted the cabinets. Shout-out to my in-laws for coming down to help us with the project – we could’ve have been able to do it without you both!
BEFORE PHOTOS:
As you can see, the kitchen was pretty rough, haha! We weren’t sure that the cabinet doors would able to be salvageable but Mike was able to sand them down really well and we made it worked. This was a huge relief to us because we didn’t really want to spend money on getting brand new cabinet doors. At this point, every decision we make for the home, we are also keeping resale in the back of our minds. This is our first home so it’s not going to be our dream home, which is okay! 🙂 We’ve got to be choosy with what’ll actually improve the value of the house and sometimes that means not picking everything out that we want.
I originally wanted to paint the upper cabinets white and the lower cabinets navy blue, but I ended up going with all white. Since the kitchen is small, I figured having the cabinets be all white would help it appear larger and more open. I’ll save my original plan for our dream house. 😉
When it came to the flooring, we knew the color we wanted but it was hard to explain. When we saw the photo of the vinyl we ended up going with, we knew immediately that was our color!
My mother-in-law and I worked on painting the cabinets while Mike and his dad ripped out the old flooring and installed the new flooring. His dad used to do flooring professionally which was a huge help for us!
Overall, the project went really smooth and we didn’t encounter any major issues – thank God! We are SO pleased with the finished project!
AFTER PHOTOS:
Talk about night and day, right?! SUCH a refreshing difference! You have no idea how happy we are about how it turned out. It’s a dream!! Even on the gloomy, rainy days it still feels bright and welcoming. I told Michael that it mayyyy even inspire me to try and cook… just maybe. 😉 haha!
What do you think?! Have you ever done your flooring or cabinets on your own? How did it go? Were you in love with it? Let’s chat!
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