Renovations Finished

Old KitchenOver the summer and fall we did some house renovations including the kitchen and two bathrooms. Barb and I love to cook so updating the kitchen was a dream come true for us and we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. We did everything from top to bottom including floors, cupboards, counter top and appliances. While the renovation was being done, we set up a temporary kitchen in our sunroom (which we had to cleanup and finally paint before hand).

New Kitchen
It worked out pretty well as this all happened in June and July, so the weather was pleasant. The whole process went quite smoothly and took about a month and a half from start to finish. Except for the backspash which we kind of dragged our feet on as we did not know what we wanted. Finally Barb found some tiles that she liked, which were a special order. After we got them, we decided we needed something else to break it up a bit and found a set of tiles with plant leaves pressed into them. As they were also a custom order we asked for maple leaves (we’re Canadian eh!).

BacksplashThis of course took a very long time and when we finally got the tiles, the quality was not what we expected and had to have them re-ordered. Finally we had everything collected by about the end of November and got Jim (our bathroom guy) to come over and do the job. He got about 80% done and ran out of tiles, so another order and another wait and finally we got them and Jim finished the job this weekend. Even though it took such a long time, we are really happy with the result.

Old Master BathThe bathrooms turned out pretty nice as well. Our main bathroom was a horrible blue thing with an enormous jacuzzi tube that we never used and hated to clean. Whoever did the work on The Blue Banana (as Barb called it) were complete hacks, Jim was appalled by what he found when he opened the wall including beer bottles stacked half way up the wall. They even signed the wall Moose and Dickhead, they sure weren’t kidding. Anyway, after much muttering and shaking of his head, Jim managed to sort the mess out.

New Master Bath As the job progressed, he got happier and happier and by the end of it, proclaimed it, his best bathroom ever. We are also pretty pleased with the result, it turned out pretty nice and Barb finally has a usable bathtub after 7 years of doing without.

The final room in the project was the small bathroom off of our master bedroom. This was the easiest of the bunch as it was so small that there really wasn’t much you could do with it other than update it a bit. The only real problem here was when the granite company cracked the marble and then proceeded the claim that it was impossible that they could have done it, therefore we must have.