The first project- Kitchen Cabinet Liners

Teal countertops, teal floor tile, teal in the wall paper, teal shelf liner- the previous owners had a thing for teal I guess.




When we did the final walk through of the new house with our realtor she asked me, what are you going to do first? Having helped us buy and sell our first house, she knew of our diy ways. My answer was to take down the wallpaper. That project is long from over at this point, but I did get something else done.




The kitchen cabinets were dusty and greasy. I cleaned them out since we needed to be able to put stuff in them. I pulled out the old shelf liners, cleaned the cabinets inside and out, and put cork shelf liner in all of the drawers. I used this black, padded shelf liner stuff on the lazy susan and the bottom of this other cabinet. I love the look of the cork liner in the white drawers. Cork is what we used inside our old cabinets. We bought the cork liner at Lowes. It's also available at Home Depot or even Michael's. I must confess that I haven't finished the upper cabinets yet. I decided that I would use white shelf liner for the upper cabinets. The cork seems to work best in closed in spaces (like the inside of a drawer) rather than folded over the edge of an open shelf. I cleaned the upper cabinets, but ran out of gas to get all the white shelf liner cut. It is non adhesive like the black stuff, so hopefully it will stay in place well enough, but be easy to take out and clean if needed.







































The cork covers a multitude of sins. The little drawer had knives in it before and was totally messed up by them. Can't tell any more!

The New Before House

Here are some pictures of the new place before we moved all of our furniture in. It's a little sad to start over again. The house has a lot of nice features, but it also has a lot of little things that need fixing. That, and a lot of painting. It's taking far longer to remove the kitchen wallpaper than I thought it would. That stuff is stuck!
This first picture is the dining room. The wood is very messed up near the bay window. It will probably need to be redone at some point. We also need to install the chandelier we bought on clearance for this room (the previous owners took their chandelier).
The second picture is a view of the living room (and part of the dining room) from the stairs. Someday the navy blue carpet is going bye bye. I think having wood there and up the stairs would be nice.





Third and Fourth pictures are the master bath. The kids are big fans of the big tub. I am not a fan of the flimsy window covering. We still haven't put up the curtain rod we bought yet. I'm going to use the cloth shower curtain we had in the old house up as a curtain.






























The fifth picture is the master bedroom. I've already taken down the ugly motel-grade wall lamp. I desperately want to paint this room. The green is just not doing it for me. I was thinking of stenciling the wall behind the bed. (We do have our real bed now, we had an air mattress the first couple of days).






Speaking of green, the sixth picture is of the girls' bright green bathroom. Even the ceiling is painted bright green. I'm in no hurry to paint this room. At least they left a shower curtain that coordinates with the wall color.







The seventh picture is the small room next to the MBR. Right now it is full of wall art, craft stuff, and random junk. It would be the ideal room for a nursery. The girls probably would have liked to have the purple room, but they picked the second biggest room instead.







The eighth picture is another small room which we are using as an office. All of the rooms are pretty dirty and dusty and are basically in need of touch up paint. They didn't leave any touch up paint though. I don't mind the blue color here. I might need to buy some similar paint or something. I'm excited to actually get this room set up. The big desk is sitting in the middle of the room right now. I want to build more table space for a craft area and put in some book shelves. This house has a serious lack of built in storage. We have far fewer bookcases than we used to (since we built a lot of shelves and other builtins in the old house).
The ninth picture is of the guest room. It's kind of a playroom at the moment- ie it looks like several toy boxes exploded inside it. The first time we saw the house this was the room with the mattress on the floor and a large collection of beer cans strewn about.




The last picture is of the kitchen and living room. I love the high ceilings and large windows. There is tons of light (well at least there is when we get a break from all the rain!) That kitchen tile is teal ceramic tile. The family room carpet is filthy. The kitchen cabinets were all filthy. The inside of the fireplace/chimney is filthy (are we seeing a pattern here?) You can see just a bit of the "lovely" wallpaper.
Clean up continues. Unpacking and figuring out where to put stuff continues. Wallpaper removal continues and continues. It's hard to believe we've already been here a month! Hopefully I'll have some afters to share before too long!