Choices, Choices - What to do about our motion-sensor?

The state of our front door:


As you can see, we have a bright white screen door - and a faux oak front door. Decisions on those will have to wait until the spring but in the meantime, I really really REALLY want to change out the motion sensor that sits above our front door. The challenge? What finish??? Black, brass, bronze? There are too many choices and I have no idea where to go with this as I really feel that whatever I do outside needs to build upon what I am doing inside. What are your thoughts? After a bit of searching, I found this pretty light via Home Depot:


I like the colour and the price ($30?!) - it might be good for a temporary solution? That said, I'm always afraid to go temporary - it may just end up permanent.

The Battle that is our Kitchen Floor

As I previous noted here, I love marmoleum. As part of our kitchen renovation, we've decided that we are going to have our kitchen floor redone in their serene gray, similar to the one in the photo linked to above. In order to have this installed, we have to remove all flooring down to the subfloor. We started on this, thinking it would be an easy project.


This beautiful floating floor in faux oak completely clashed with the three other wood finishes in the kitchen (as well as the real hardwoods everywhere else). It was easy to take out, leaving us with vinyl tiles.


Once this floor was revealed, we actually ended up changing our original choice for colour on the flooring. Originally, we had picked a much darker gray but these light floors inspired us to lighten it all up. That said, they quickly became a huge source of frustration. Check out my hub literally trying to chisel them away, they were really fixed to the floor! Not only that but the adhesive had turned into this tar, it was so awful. After working on it a bit, we eventually discovered that under that level was yet ANOTHER level of vinyl tiles...


And at that point, we promptly gave up. It's obvious that we will have to replace the subfloor - thankfully, our flooring company (The Healthiest Home here in Ottawa) will be doing the replacement for us. We'll be trying to rip that out on our own (wish us luck!).

Our kitchen demo - the beginning!

This is part 1 of our kitchen renovation...

We started our reno in a pretty disorganized way - we really had so much to take out, we just grabbed a corner and got started. This wall (west facing into the sunroom) was THE wall, complete with boarded up window and a weird built in. Both were slated to go so this is what I offer up first ;) So you can see in this photo that I had already climbed up and ripped down the plexi glass that had previously lined the top of the cupboards. We had yet to free the window...


In this picture, you can see that we had taken down our useless stove fan (note to other home shoppers, always figure out where the stove vents). We had no idea that ours vented absolutely nowhere...so with it gone, we also took out the upper cabinet to make it easier to demo the weird built-in. You can see that once upon a time, the kitchen was blue. I later found some coordinating wall paper - I think this wasn't the previous wall treatment but the pre-pre as the wallpaper is painted over (yay) and there are at least two other paint colours on top of it.


Now here it is, the WINDOW! I can't even tell you how excited we were to discover that not only was the window intact, it was actually in perfect shape. Yay!! Only problem? The stove vent had been wired up behind the molding on the left side so that ended up biting the dust. :(



Now you can see that the built-in is gone! The space already feels so much larger, we also managed to salvage the lower cabinets (yay!).

Tools that we discovered made it all easy:
- Reciprocating Saw
- Pry bars (one big, one small)
- Patience
- A cordless driver
- Step stool
- Decent ladder
- Rubber mallet (for places on the walls that you want to be kind of gentle with)
- A shop vac (so much dust, it was such a great investment!)
- Box cutters
- Sheet plastic and tape
- Face masks and safety goggles
- Good leather work gloves (that are fitted)

And of course: a sledge hammer.

Lessons learned:
- Seal other rooms really well. I used plastic drop sheets and tape, it was effective though it made it hard to get to essential places like the bathroom.
- Score the walls first, especially the ones you want to keep. It helps to use box cutters - this will keep your lines nice and clean.
- Clean up often, have a fan on hand and make sure you open your windows.
- Figure out where your load bearing walls are, it's better to be safe than sorry.
- Have beer on hand (or other powerful motivator).
- Seal your heat vents - I used cardboard after I discovered that my hub had ripped the cover off (to protect it) and then promptly filled the hole and vent with crap.
- Plan for your garbage - we had two garbage cans and quickly discovered that bags were a really crappy way of dealing with the plaster we ripped down.
- Having good friends help you out is the best way to aleviate stress and make it all fun.

Glass kitchen cabinets via Home Depot

I saw this great picture via the inspiration gallery of Home Depot. The hub really wants glass cabinets in the kitchen and I thought this style was perfect...then I found the price. Pretty darling for over $2k, a bit out of the question for a kitchen makeover. I can dream - maybe one day, right?

Dealing with our kitchen cabinets

After we knew that we had the house, we went on this awesome decision-making roller coaster. At first we thought, "Lets reno the whole damn kitchen! New cupboards, new counters, new floors, new EVERYTHING!!" It was exciting but not at all financially realistic. After a couple of dreaming days, we realized that to really be able to afford this house we would have to live with the kitchen for a few years and settle on some updates. Basically, we had to accept that we would have to work with the ugly cupboards. After making that decision, we decided that there was nothing a coat of paint couldn't remedy and immediately embraced the idea. After all, I'm an avid refinisher and extremely detail oriented...But after doing all the measurements and truely assessing the state of the kitchen, we realized that we were actually pretty short on cupboard space. I knew then that we would have to buy some new cupboards but that our budget couldn't get us all the way there.

Ah!

The solution? Well, we are going to buy similar cabinets from Ikea (not my first choice but good enough) and paint them all out to match each other.



(It's all the same, right?)

We're hoping, of course, that the difference wouldn't be that noticable. Has anyone ever tried this before?? Anyway. Here is what we chose - the Aukurm series by Ikea in Lilje dark brown. Why the brown? Because it is actually wood - we want it to paint nicely and I just haven't had good experiences with painting up melamine. Here's to hoping it all works out!!!