The Organization Begins

So I mentioned in my last post about my secret messes.  Well, I got a good one for you today.  I ask that you do not judge me. I swear, we are organized and very clean.  This is just what my life had become.  Hence, my spice drawer...

This is not staged, this is for real. Every time a spice is needed, you have to lift everyone to see what they are, the Penzey spice bags are thrown around depending what was under them. 

I've got a new love for mason jars. I love the uniformity and the size options available.  So I sorted through my spices. Got rid of the ones that expired in 2008 and those containing any gluten/wheat/emulsifiers in them and here is my new beloved spice drawer.  Everything is uniform and labeled on top.  I used the half-pint regular mouth jars for the smaller spices and  quart wide mouth jars for the bigger spices.  I found the jars in packs of twelve at Publix.  Oh, I'm actually excited about cooking dinner tonight.

I considered painting the lids with chalkboard paint to make it that much cuter, but I figured the chalk would rub off.  Have you used mason jars to organize? I've got some more mason jar organization in the works.  My kitchen counter looks like if I'm actually canning something, full of jars and lids and all kinds of mess.  I'm in an organizing madness...watch out.

8 Years Ago Today

We bought our house 8 years ago today.  If you've gotten the chance to read my first post, you can see how we happened upon this old 1955 house.  We are totally in love with it and have dreams to be here forever, if we can add on to the house (unless we can afford to live on the water, then I will be willing to sacrifice).  So today, I will be showing you all the lovely before pictures of the main living areas of our house. Later this week I'll do the rest.  Get ready, it's scary.

Here's our living room.  This was the view when you first walked in the front door to the right.

This was the view to the left.  You can see our hallway to the bedrooms and bathroom.

During the remodeling.  We took off all the slate and tile.

We added a niche wall.

As you walked through our rather small living room you entered the kitchen.  A lovely collection of slate and rust colored Formica were there to greet you.  This was the view from our front door.  This area is now our dining room.

This is what it looked like when we bought it, missing cabinets and all.

Here is the area mid-construction.  This half wall that divided up the living room and kitchen was eliminated.

As you walked through the original kitchen, to the right was this den.  We knocked down walls and closets and moved our kitchen to the den.  It seemed like a better flow and we weren't too sure about having our kitchen be the first thing people saw when they walked in the front door.

This is the view to the old kitchen, now dining room, from the den.

The next room that is entered through our now dining room and kitchen is our family room.

That is the wall we knocked down to get into our current kitchen.

What do you think?  The house went through a major remodel in 1977 when the previous owners bought the house and it stopped there.  The house was disgusting. When we removed the tile, there was years of dog hair accumulating under it, the linoleum had moldy cat pee, there was a rats nest in the family room, and I can keep going.  I still occasionally find a can of Old Milwaukee lost in the bushes in the yard and it makes me smile.  If you are thinking of buying a fixer upper, GO FOR IT! Just expect a lot of work, money spending, and some fights, but when you look around and you know every inch of your house was touched by you, it makes it all worth it.  I would think about doing it all over again...well, as long as it's on the water.

Our Kitchen

When we bought the house, our now dining room, was the kitchen.  This space below was termed a "den".  I say, it's where the previous owner's cats spent most of their time.  You see those black/brown stains on the linoleum, yea, when we lifted that, there was mold from cat pee.  I can't even think about it without getting sick.  There was a closet to the right, an off centered window, and a crazy bookshelf to the left. 

The door to the left is an entrance to a guest bathroom and the door to the right is the entrance to the hallway leading to our office.

This is the view of the kitchen or our now dining room.  The entrance was the width of a door.

And here is our kitchen now.  We widened the entrance quite a bit.  Got rid of the closet and centered the window.  We also moved the entrance to the guest bathroom to the hallway. These are Ikea Abstrakt doors and Akurum bases.  We built these all ourselves.  I actually did the initial build, and my husband tightened and installed them with his dad.

To the right is the bookshelf wall that we tore down from the first picture above.  That is our family room.

Here is the view from our family room of the kitchen.  Here you can see the hallway to our office and the entrance to our guest bathroom.  I finally ordered my rug.  I LOVE it! It goes great with our black speckled granite counter tops.

Here's the sink area.  The sun is beaming in.  It's a West facing window, so we get tons of light in the afternoons.

This Nespresso machine is what I gave my husband for Christmas. He loves it.

This is another angle where you can see my living room.  Our house is completely open.  We really love having this open concept feel through out the main living areas of our house.  We knocked down walls and opened things up as much as possible. It makes the house feel much bigger than it actually is.

Here you can see our dining room to the left and our family room to the right.

A view of the ceilings, which is probably the main reason we originally bought this hideous house.

We spent our first year of marriage without a kitchen. I am not kidding. We ate lots of pizza, take out, and in-laws cooking.  I think I gained like 10 pounds that year.  We had a foldout table with a microwave, toaster oven, and a refrigerator. We ran out of money after all the work to the house so it took us a while to get the kitchen together.  At the time, there was no Ikea in the area, so we actually had to have it shipped.  The cost of the kitchen wasn't bad, but the shipping alone was something like $1,000.  Oh, and we changed our mind about the layout when we started installing.  We had the refrigerator and wine refrigerator swapped, but it SO did not work.  I'm so glad we were willing to reorder some cabinets.  Have you done a major kitchen remodel?

Kitchen Rug Ideas

I'm loving these rugs from Huset.  I first saw them on My Adventure is Your Advantage and fell in love.  If you haven't been to her blog, check it out. It's chock full of amazing finds.  I can add them all to my Pinterest boards, seriously. Well, back to the rugs, I'm thinking as a runner in front of my sink and dishwasher. I've never had a rug in my kitchen before, mostly because I haven't found the right one.  I realized when writing this post that I haven't posted pictures of my kitchen yet, I'll work on that.

Love! This rug might be it!  Now, which color?  Is it OK to spend $200 on a kitchen rug?  I'm justifying that I've never purchased one before, so this will make up for the last 6-7 years without one.