Our Terra Cottage home remodel blogging begins! I want to name our home Terra Cottage because I like Tara from Gone with the Wind and the whole home is Terra Cotta floors, so I thought it was a cute play on words. A few blogs back I mentioned that we bought a foreclosed home that needed a lot of fixing up. I'm going to start with the kitchen because its the central point of a home. We aren't completely done with our kitchen yet but we're close! You'll see I excluded pictures of the stove section because its not done yet (I'll share that in phase 2).
Here is the before picture with dark brown cabinets, pink walls, and laminate counters. It was very dark and obviously unfinished. I have no idea what they were thinking with the pink walls but the house was built in '89 and this was all original, so it must have been the style. They left an amazing fridge, which was super sweet! The ice maker was broken, the dishwasher, oven / stove, and counters were gone which is common in foreclosures.
Kitchen (Before)
The whole home is pretty much terra cotta tile which originally I wasn't so keen on but it has really grown on me. The floors are staying for now because that is a huge project to re-tile the entire house and we're trying to do most of the work ourselves (by ourselves...my husband is the skilled one :) love him).
We decided to do this kitchen remodel on the cheap, so rather than tearing the whole thing out we kept everything. We had the cabinets sanded and painted. We used Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter on the main cabinets and BM Silver Gray on the island cabinets. The walls are painted BM China White and the trim is BM Simply White (the window trim was unfinished wood). We are strongly considering painting the wood-finish window white as well because the window stands out a bit too much now, but we'll see how we feel about it down the road...once its painted you can't go back! Jason built shelves where the ice maker was which turned out great (because ice makers can be ~$3k to replace and according to the appliance guy the stand alone ice makers break often). We replaced the beaded rope crown moulding with a more traditional chunky crown moulding (Jason and my father-in-law did that project together one night). You can see originally the beaded rope crown was running in front of the window, I didn't like the idea of blocking the window with crown so you can see in the after photo the window area looks more open.
Kitchen (After)
For the island counter, we just bought
this oak slab from Lumber Liquidators and Jason cut it down to fit. For the main counter, we did 4x8
Neri White Glossy Ceramic Field Tile and 2x8 matching bullnose for the edge. The backsplash is my favorite things about the kitchen! It is 1x4
Brocade Calacatta Gold (italian white marble) Herringbone Mosaic tile with a Calacatta Gold pencil you can see on either side of the window to finish off the edge. Pencils and trim are easy to forget about in projects but are really important for a finished look.
Okay, so one of the big money items of the kitchen was this awesome farmhouse sink. My husband and I had gone back and forth on just getting a standard sink because it would be easier to install, we wouldn't have to modify the cabinet, and it was cheaper. However, I just felt like this kitchen HAD to have a farmhouse sink to tie everything together. We bought
this Whitehaus single bowl fireclay farmhouse sink online and it came in great. You will see the price of this sink is fantastic compared to typical farmhouse sinks. The
faucet we ordered online from Home Depot, I love the look and functionality however I have been upset with the quality a bit because the base twists...our plumber said its the faucet and there isn't anything he can do about it.
That's it so far on the kitchen. Are you guys working on any DIY projects? More to come on our house remodeling.
