<it's wordy, if you skip stuff, i want the poor previously unloved rental house with no personality to be a happy fun place for my 1 year old to live in. the end. (well, i like being happy too!)>
well, we rent this house. it's a tiny mill workers house from 1893, across the river from the old mill that is now a mall. we can't buy for a couple years, when walgreens gives my husband his own store to manage and we know where we'll live. but our landlord will let us change stuff, and take any improvements out of the rent. (soon we will get a dishwasher, and a bathroom door, among other things, thanks to that neato fact!) so anyways, i imagine an old couple sold the house to the landlord, it has the cheapest of everything, and nothing has been updated in years, lots was apperently done by not-so-handy previous owners... and notice there's not a single drawer in the cheapo kitchen cabinets? argh, why?
?) on to the resolution part...
my husband and i met while doing katrina relief in new orleans and buras louisiana. between the 2 of us we spent 12 months living in a tent volunteering. without an income. when we became pregnant with amelia, we were over an hour from the closest grocery store, or doctor. it was an incredible experience, but we had to come up here and prepare for a baby a few months into the pregnancy. and we'd both been traveling for years, so settling anywhere was odd. before volunteering and meeting joe and making a daughter, i was hitch-hiking and hopping trains, joe managed a bar kitchen in the french quarter pre-katrina, but left right before the storm to pick organic blueberries in maine.... that's not how babies should live. (and we're college educated folk, not entirely crazy.)
sooo, it's been really important to me to make a stable happy home for my daughter, who turned 1 the other day, even if we don't own this place. we'll be here a few years. and not live i some place that doesn't feel like us with dingy white walls and the numerous problems this house has.
i started the kitchen last week, to have it done before my daughters b-day party on feb. 2nd. so i decided to add it here too, since the timing coincided. my goal is to have the house all done by summer, paint the living room, joes computer room, the bedroom, babys room, bath, hallway, and my studio. and the mudroom. prolly a room a month, since there's some remodeling involved, and things like murals in the babys room.
but enough, here's the kitchen!!
it was originally horribly wallpaper i had to wet and scrape off for days, not vinyl, paper wallpaper. horrid stuff. and ugly. so i painted. hmm, i made the curtains first, then matched the paint to them. they're muslin backed. i made a table runner and a matching "mamas gone shopping" tote. i got all the junk off the table- my jewelry, not really junk- onto the wall and organized elsewhere, i got my mary shrine up finally, i covered the light plate switch, but need to cover the outlets too, they're fabric and mod podge. hmm, don't know what else. so here it is!
before-
during-
during, only pic of the ugly wallpaper-
the ugly pantry (it had a door we had to remove cause it was so broken. note the lovely fake stucco walls, the who knows how old ugly shelf paper, and crappy wood paneling in the back!)-
if you peek carefully into the living room you can see the new couch, and maybe the antique pine trunk i just got last weekend, but never mind the rest of the house, it all needs work! it will show up here over the rest of the year, i'm sure!
