One of the reasons posting has gotten slow lately is because summer is here and I can work on our house again. This summer/fall we have four goals, we are renovating the kitchen, the bathroom, the upstairs bedroom and the putting in a new new fence outside. We are doing as much of the work our selves as we can, which I’m finding very gratifying but slow. Still I’m happy to learn new things. The image above is one I did in photoshop to help us invision what we are looking to do. We’ve already refinished the cabinets as you’ll see in some of the photos below. We have also redone the floor, pulling all the old laminate layers up (about an inch of them), sanding and refinishing the maple underneath.

Here’s a look at where we started. Check out the door handles under the sink. Must have been so the mice could reach them.

We picked out lights and I built a kitchen island and put a temp countertop on it made out of plywood.

We finally ordered our new quartz countertop last weekend and immediately after I started pulling the old tan tiles off the backsplash so when the dude comes to make his template he can go right to the wall and we can tile on top of the counter with our new matte white subway tiles which we also ordered. The counters will have a one bay under-mount sink. We went to a plumbing show room and picked out what we wanted but them found everything online for hundreds less and often tax and shipping free. The Lenova Zero Radius sink we liked was quoted at over $600 but we got it for a fraction of the price online.

Popping tiles off ended up being quite a mess. More than just tiles came off the wall. Horse hair plaster had a pesky habit of coming off too. I ended up almost removing all the plaster on one wall as you can see in the photo above.

In order to keep posting and working on the house I’m going to start posting a bit more about the house work. Hopefully everyone will enjoy it as much as I do. All you DIY’s out there are welcome to chip in with comments and advice.