Big Changes!

When we found out I was pregnant out flooring projects moved to the top of our to do list. We got most of the cork installed before Ben was born but now it's time to move on to the kitchen's cracked linoleum tile.

You know how home improvement projects tend to snowball? Our freezer has been leaking into our fridge and our dishwasher doesn't work the best so we thought we should replace them too. If we were replacing two appliances we might as well get a new range to match. Turns out they no longer make 40 inch wide ranges so we'll have to reconfigure the cabinets above it. Tyler and i have never been big on the pink so we thought we would paint the cabinets white while we were at it (plus there are some sweet white ice appliances). We had a local contractor come by and he said it would cost as much to paint them as it would for new cabinets so we should just start from scratch. We had a MCM architect give us his opinion and he said the same thing but added that keeping them would greatly limit the design. He also saw the value in them and suggested we move them to the basement. So we started thinking about reconfiguring our whole kitchen and switch the office crack into the breakfast nook it was designed to be.

Tyler has never liked the kitchen being so segregated from the rest of the house (it was designed as a servants kitchen). He had thus crazy idea to move the kitchen into the dining room and slide the dining room into the living room (since the "family room" is just a few feet away). We could move the washer and dryer into the old kitchen space and build a bedroom in the old breakfast/ laundry areas. This project was MUCH more difficult than just redoing the kitchen and there were tons of obstacles to overcome. Walking through the laundry room to get to the bedroom was lame so we'd have to build a hallway (which would make it a lot darker) and there wasn't access to a full bath so we would probably have to redo the half bath. There are two doors to the outside from that "bedroom" so I thought we could continue the hallway to the side door but that would make the bedroom even smaller. The laundry room is also a slightly different size and there is a giant curved window too. Basically it was a huge pain in the butt but we had the architect come back to see what he thought.

After lots of brainstorming and going over the blueprints we decided that moving the kitchen was a pretty awesome idea but a the bedroom thing probably wasn't going to work. We decided (for now at least) to leave the laundry room where it is and just finish the kitchen/ breakfast room to be a playroom or studio or craft room. I really like the idea of integrating the kitchen (and giving Tyler his dream kitchen) as well as adding a playroom for Bens toys. We'll see what happens next!


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