Our House
Welcome to our little cottage-that-could!
Our house started out as a two-bedroom, 1 bath cottage, but the previous owners added a new kitchen, master bedroom, master bath and laundry room to the right side of the house in 2003.
We bought the place on October 31st, 2007, and while it’s still very much a work in progress, here are some photos that show what we’ve done to the place over the past three years.
When we moved in, the kitchen looked like this:
It had heavily-grained oak cabinets, light beige formica counters, pistachio-green painted walls, gray ceramic tile (complete with uneven, un-sealed, badly stained grout lines), cheap appliances (all of them stopped working within the first year we lived here!) and a row of “boob” lights down the center of the ceiling. We started by painting the walls a custom shade of pale blue, and the cabinets got coated with a custom black. The photo below is from our Nest Magazine shoot…
And while we couldn’t afford to replace the counters, or buy all new appliances right away, accesories like satin nickel bin pulls and knobs from eBay, baskets from Ikea, and hanging herb crates helped give the space a little more cottage charm. Below is a photo of the formula for the black paint on the cabinets…
And this is the formula we used for the blue paint on the walls…
We also installed the bead board backsplash ourselves, and it has held up wonderfully over the past three years. We painted it with plain old, right-off-the-shelf, semi-gloss while paint from the home improvement store. We added mirrors to the inside of the upper cabinets to help open up the room a little and the corbels underneath the upper cabinets came from Home Depot.
But as time went by, we started to crave a lighter look, so we broke out our brushes again and painted the upper cabinets Alabaster white (Sherwin Williams) and the lower cabinets Mourning Dove gray (Martha Stewart by Sherwin Williams) and the walls a lightened version of a (Sherwin Williams) color called Rice Grain…
(Click on the paint color names for more information about them)
The rug came from the Pottery Barn outlet in Georgia, and the dishwasher was given to us by a local reader who wasn’t using it anymore. The flooring in the photo above was purchased on eBay, but has since been removed and we’re hoping to get some new tile laid in there soon!
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Next up on the house tour is our reading room. We’re guessing it used to be the one and only bathroom in the house. (A second bath was added on the other side of the house in 2003.) Here are a couple of shots that show what the room looked like when we moved in, and what it looks like now…
That’s not the first makeover we gave it though. Nope. The first time around we gave it stripes and sunburst mirrors…
You can read about that makeover here and here. (The stripes are Natural Choice by Sherwin Williams and Fencepost by Behr.)
Anywho- back to the latest look…
We did a simple board and batten treatment on the walls and painted them (and the floor) Benjamin Moore’s ‘Moonlight White’. We also attached some reclaimed gymnasium flooring to the back wall in the room. You can find information on everything we used in the room throughout (and at the bottom of) this post.
We have many more rooms left to tackle around here, and I look forward to adding them to this page as soon as they’re complete!