Our new old house!

[SkipW]

Very pretty inside and out...kind of jealous.

Did you decorate to match your dog?

We have a Westie and everyone who sees we have lots of white furniture understands....

[CrestwoodCottage]

Thanks everyone! We do have a handful of rowdy pets around here. Two dogs, the one pictured is a pit-bull rescue so he has a few bad habits(once he ate a hole into the drywall all the way through to insulation while being crated in his kennel! ) but all and all is a good dog and a boston terrier who my husband says is the nastiest little dog alive We also have two cats but they cause us little headache. Don't be fooled by all the light colors...I made sure when I bought that sofa that it was easy to clean and so far it's been amazing and the big dog isn't allowed on the couch. The curtains are just $10 painters drop clothes, jute rugs are inexpensive and hold up dirty dogs and most of everything else is thrift store finds..it just looks like I have expensive taste but I'm actually extremely frugal

[CrestwoodCottage]

Okay folks, here is my desperate attempt to love my kitchen. This kitchen was almost a deal breaker for me when we were buying the house. I was told that the original kitchen was long gone when previous owner bought the house and that the layout was terrible, so I can appreciate a newly updated kitchen but everything about this kitchen was TOTALLY opposite of my style and not to mention the cheap builder grade cabinets. The rest of the house is so bright and airy with tons of large windows but this kitchen is dark and has very little natural light so the dark cabinets and dark granite(ugh, granite...anyone else over the hype of granite?) did nothing for the space. I took down a couple of cabinets to let the natural light flow through the room and added open shelves, painted the cabinets, added height with larger crown molding, removed the granite backsplash to lighten it up a tad, tiled the backsplash and added some super cool ribbon LED lighting under the cabinets. I rather have an old kitchen will a million coats of paint but you can't have everything you want can you?

[Don M]

Big improvement; totally transforms the space---well done!!

[Gothichome]

Yes it sure does improve the aesthetic and the brightness of the kitchen.

[drew1910]

I really like the painted cabinets, transforms the entire kitchen!

[Powermuffin]

Your new home is charming. But, it seems totally unfair to those of us still fixing up our old houses for you to post such beautiful pictures! Where is the broken plaster, the multiple layers of flooring, the nasty wallpaper, and the spiders??? I am so green with envy.
Diane

[Nicholas]

Wow. Now I am taking another look at my wood kitchen cabinets.

That shelving where the cabinets use to be is really, really nice, I am going to show my wife these pics. My kitchen is also dark, the slate floor doesn't help, but with white cabinets, it may make a big difference. Our kitchen looks kinda 70's, I notice that you changed the cabinet handles to an older style too.

Very nice!

[CrestwoodCottage]

Thanks everyone! Nicholas, I'm not sure what your kitchen is like but ours really could have used the taller cabinets so instead of replacing upper cabinets to give them height, I added a 1x4, chair rail molding and a large crown to the top. You may not notice much of a difference in the photos but when you are in the room it really transformed the space with the cabinets being taller. It was also a very inexpensive! My shelves are just unpainted wooden brackets from home depot and unfinished oak stair treads!

[CrestwoodCottage]

Diane, We've lived through the broken plaster, old painted over wallpaper, cave crickets, spiders, mice, etc etc. for the past 3 years and once we got it all polished up(a polished turd!) we sold and bought a renovated(a little too renovated for my tasted) old house! My husband isn't very handy and doesn't enjoy renovations as much as I do, so it was a compromise....I got another old house but renovated this time! I'm just re-renovating!