$80 Kitchen Remodel Reveal!

When I tell people I redid my kitchen, including now countertops, for around $80, they always look at me like I'm nuts. But it happened, and I've got to say I'm so proud of my thriftiness and creativity!

To get caught up to speed, you should probably read my post on my original PLAN for this room. I followed that up with a step by step of what I had decided to do in Let's Talk Kitchen Renovation! A lot of prices and products I used are listed in those posts.


This project was a LONG time overdue in happening, but now that's it's over I am kicking myself that I didn't do it like this when we originally did the room 5 years ago.  Remember how it looked before?? (The various was it looked before? haha!) To see how it looked in the VERY BEGINNING of our lives here, you can check out the KITCHEN EVOLUTION post.

Yeah, all that's gone now! I can't believe I lived like that for almost 5 whole years!

BUT HERE IT IS NOW!!

Let me show you around! - I would like to note that I got this project finished while I still had all my summer decor out, but now it's all fall-ish at my house, so things decor-wise may look a bit different now.

Yeah! It's so much brighter!! I love it!

I love how the table looks (it's showing up very red in this photo. It's not that red) with the new wall color, so much prettier!

I kept a lot of what I already had over my cabinets, including my big "BLESSED" that I got on sale at Hobby Lobby a few years ago.

It says "Missy's Kitchen, est. 2009" The bottle is a "Cheerwine" bottle. It's a lot like Cherry Coke but more cherry than coke. My Mom used to love it when she was in her early 20's and first married. I think she actually lived in the town where they made it, but I'm not sure. We found this at Cracker Barrel and bought a few bottles! And then the Mason Jar is filled with rocks that I picked up from out of the ocean in the Bahamas when we went in 2013.

My giant "R" was also from Hobby Lobby. I painted the bottle and the star blue with leftover front door paint! And, ya gotta have the glass "RC Cola" bottle. It's Aaron's favorite drink, ever! 

I thought it would be cute to have some photos of Aaron and I in the kitchen when we were little on display. This one is of him, ear to ear in chocolate pudding. How adorable?!

And this one is me, in my Dorothy costume, making biscuits with my Mama. I was probably 3 or 4. 

I change out this picture seasonally, but it's always a shot of me and my Dad. This one is a fun memory. He'd been fishing and pulled up in the driveway yelling for my Mom to bring me outside. He said "I caught a fish that's as big as my baby! Bring her out here and let's measure them up!" And, as you can see, the fish is as big as his baby. :)  Currently there's a shot of him and me, as Little Red Riding Hood, on Halloween in the frame by the window!

The pantry stands out so much more than it did before! It's easier for me to see what I have now!

Here's my iPad/TV set up in the kitchen! It's such a small space I wouldn't have room for a TV, unless it was teeny, so I just hook the iPad up to this iPod dock, put the iPad on an easel, and there ya have it, instant television! :) I use the heck out of this system! (I do need a less obnoxious easel though!)

 My microwave area! It's amazing to me how much easier this room is to keep clean now!! This section of the room was the first to get "finished" and for a moment I thought it was all too light, but after living with it for a few days, I had no regrets!

The stove (it's even prettier now!), and my little helper! She hung in there like a trooper with me while I was doing all of this! I did purchase the hand towel, and pot holder and oven mitt set specifically for the new kitchen and it was a $5 set from Dollar General!

I decided I was too tired to cook the day after it was all finished (I finished it around 2 or 3am, actually) so I stuck a meal in the crock pot! 

I leave this butcher block cutting board out all the time. It's arranged a bit differently now, for fall, but it's still out all the time. A very good idea, and super easy to clean up!

DIY EVERYTHING! Haha! DIY lotion, and DIY lamp! I painted both the lamp base and the shade! If I eventually find something I like better, ok, and if I don't I like this just fine! 

 MORE DIY! I did the "EAT" out of cardboard. I free-handed the letters, cut them out with an exact-o knife (it's not perfect but I didn't expect it to be), painted them blue with leftover front door paint and attached them to the wall with 3M tape! I LOVE it!  The curtains over the windows I found on sale at Dollar General for $5 a panel. I bought 3! (The one over the sink I cut in half and split up the middle!)

 My flowers and DIY table runner! My cooking utensils are actually living in the owl pitcher now, and I'm using my glass cake stand full of homemade cookies as a centerpiece! I loved that I could still use this runner! My Mom made it for me and monogrammed our last name initial onto each end. There's enough teal blue in it that it works!

 Chandelier is even more beautiful now!

The room is a small room. and we have a large table, but it all feels so much BIGGER now that it's so light!
 

I find myself WANTING to be in the kitchen now. I just LOVE how it all turned out.

Be sure to visit the posts linked above for prices on items (including my "new" countertops) and names of paint colors and such! I'm tickled pink and blue (wink wink) with this room and can't tell you how satisfying it was to completely change it for such a small price!

Thanks for catching up with me today! See y'all soon!

Our Non-Pantry

My pantry is different from other people's. I envy those of you with a nice built in, matching your cabinets, floor to ceiling style pantries. Or those of you with whole rooms built to the sides of your kitchens that house all your food. Or even with giant closets in your kitchens that act as pantries. I go to other peoples homes and I just stand and stare into their pantries, taking a mental photograph. It's sad. I sometimes refer to it as our "non-pantry."

When Aaron and I first moved into this house it became very evident to me, very quickly, that we needed a pantry. We have a fair amount of cabinet space in our kitchen, but I was having to load all of our non-refrigerator food into one cabinet, and the weight of all the cans etc was starting to weigh the cabinet down and make it sag. I could just see the cabinet falling out of the wall in the middle of the night one night. It was terrifying. I needed a solution and quickly.

So I started searching Pinterest for ideas. Pinterest was a fairly new thing at the time - it's strange calling Pinterest a "new thing" - and it didn't have a whole lot to offer me -- (Of course now it has pages and pages of "no pantry" solutions. Of course.) until I saw this picture from marthastewart.com. I don't know what it was about this precise image, but the idea light bulb lit up over my head.

There was something in that image that made it all come together in my head. So, knowing my budget, I left work that night and headed to the Family Dollar store that was just down the road.



And this is what I came up with. We had this empty space here to the side of our fridge. It had housed our trash can (which I removed for the sake of the photographs. It's usually pushed up against the side of the fridge) and a broom. And when the idea finally came to me, I knew it was the perfect spot for something like this. It's nothing super fancy. It's not very visually appealing, but it's super functional and it works for us! That's the important thing. Now I'm not going to lie and tell you that this is the permanent solution to our problems, I'm looking into maybe upgrading my shelving unit soon. This has worked for us since 2011 with little to no trouble.


What I did was I went into the Family Dollar and purchased the units. I've got a million of these things all over my house tucked into various places. They're inexpensive, easy to assemble and fairly strong for how cheap they are. I ended up deciding to buy one 4 shelf unit ($30) and one 3 shelf unit ($20), and I combined them, omitting one shelf, but using all the hardware included.

All you do it take it out of the box, lay the shelf, insert the spindle and screw (no tools required). Do you call that a spindle?? I don't know what you call it, the stick thang. Screw the stick thangs together then add another shelf. Easy. I had it assembled in probably 10 minutes. I chose not to take the unit any higher than the fridge, 1) because it would look tacky and 2) because it might be too top heavy. Like I said this isn't the most sturdy piece of furniture you could ever purchase.

After about 30 minutes of moving my food stash around I was done and so proud of myself.

This is where we keep our stockpile of food. Our "extra" food, if you want to call it that. We keep our cereals and snacks and chips and things that are open or that we use all the time (like ramen noodles, peanut butter, bread, cereal, chips, pop tarts, cookies etc) in the cabinet, but everything else lives here.  I keep all my flour, sugar, corn meal etc in a cabinet by my stove, as I reach for those all the time.

I also keep a "bag bag" hanging on the wall here and my favorite apron hangs on the door that leads into my disastrous utility room. It's an insane mess right now, let's not even go there.

I keep our weekly meal plan posted on this side of the fridge as well. This is so easy for me because I can stand at the pantry and plan my meals out. ("yoyo means 'you're on your own' for those wondering) I just found this page online - did a Google search - and printed it off. I slid it into a sheet protector and use a dry erase marker on it to write my list. I also keep my grocery list pad of paper hanging here, with a pencil. I got the pad at the dollar store, you can find these things anywhere. As soon as I run out of something, I write it down. Makes it so much easier on grocery day!


So now, let me take you on a quick tour of how I have everything set up. 

On the top shelf I keep my large package of paper towels. I buy whatever is on sale, and this time, it happened to be Bounty Basics! And in the little clear plastic box I keep baking things. Cause I don't bake cakes or cookies much, so the powdered sugar and hot chocolate and cupcake liners etc live there.

On the next shelf down this is where I keep all of our condiments and honestly whatever else will fit. Because this is such a small space to work with I kind of just have to go with whatever fits wherever.  We keep lots of salad dressings on hand as well as BBQ sauce, bacon bits, gordita shells, taco sauce and tea bags!

On the next shelf I keep all our boxes of things, like hamburger helper, stuffing and boxes of like Zatarans Rice (it's hiding in the back). I can arrange things two deep on these shelves, which I really like. We love the Save-A-Lot instant potatoes... I know, I know. It's so lazy but I could live on mashed potatoes so when I want them, I want them now and don't want to chop up potatoes and boil them and mash them and... no. I want my potatoes now. So to avoid this whole shelf being boxes of potato flakes, I keep them in this airtight container. We also have a large bag (SAM's Club) of coffee that we keep here. (We have a keurig, but buying the K-Cups was breaking the bank. We bought the refillable cups and fill them ourselves every morning. Easy, and saves all kinds of cash.)

Here I keep all our spaghetti noodles (Aaron would live on Spaghetti if I'd make it every night) and macaroni. We keep our pasta sauce here, some pasta on the side packets, and I've got all our spice packets and yeast packets organized here, where they would fit. And one lone package of Ramen Noodles. I crunch mine up in the bag before I boil them, and after I crunched this bag up I decided I wanted something else, so I just laid it in the pantry to grab next time. 

 Canned veggies go here, I also have a few empty glass jars back in the back. I like frozen veggies and canned veggies both and I keep them both in the house at all times. Save-A-Lot has a huge selection of canned vegetables!

And finally on this bottom shelf is where the heavy soup cans live. I also keep our Chef Boyardee type things here. (Please excuse the mouse trap in the corner. Old house, recently bush hogged field across the road... mice. Ick.) We aren't big soup eaters, only when we are sick or in the winter, so I don't keep a whole lot of that kind of soup, but I do use cooking soups all the time, so I run through those quickly.



Not a bad job for $50 and 40 minutes of my night, I don't think. Do you? This works for us. I am always on the hunt for a more sturdy shelving unit that is the right width, because we are working with such a cramped space. But I haven't found one for the right price as of yet. I don't have to be in a huge hurry, because, I'll say it again, this works for us. I saw the need, I made it happen!

Do you have a non-pantry pantry like us? Share it with me! I'd love to see it!

Thanks for stopping by again today! I hope you, at least, got a chuckle out of this post, I know it wasn't much, but I thought sharing this - a way to create something where there is nothing on the cheap - would be a nice post to share!

I'm working hard on the kitchen evolution post so hopefully I will be able to get it posted tomorrow, but I won't make any promises.

Home Style Evolution: Living Room

One of the things that my husband always made abundantly clear to me about this house, before I had a chance to see inside (people were living here!), was that the living room was huge. It is the biggest room in our house and I have had no trouble filling it up with large pieces of furniture.


This room is the most important room in the house, it is the room we "live in." Fitting that it's called a "living room," isn't it? So it's imperative that this room be inviting, and, above all clean and not cluttered. This is one of the rooms that seems to always be undergoing some sort of re-do. Whether I'm rearranging the placement of photographs hanging on the wall, changing the tablescapes or changing out decor, the living room is always my go-to place when I need a change. 





The photos below were shot the day we started to work on the house.

I swore that renovating this house would kill me. I'm not even gonna sugar coat it when I tell you that Aaron and I nearly broke off our engagement more than once because of the stress (and severe time crunch) we were under. 



At the end of it all, we got married (we're you worried?), and this is how our living room turned out. Keep in mind, it is decorated for Christmas here, because we moved in on 12/20, the day we got back from our honeymoon.

 

As you can see, we chose to paint the room two different colors. Honestly, folks, looking back at these photos, it doesn't even look like my house. I can't remember it ever looking like this. And what's more, I can't remember ever being happy with it looking like this. We chose a geometric print rug, because it had all of our colors in it. Reds and tans for the living room, greens for the kitchen, purples for the bathroom... they're all represented in that rug. I loved it for that reason, but nearly blew a vein when I read the price tag...

Here are some more shots from then...

Aaron broke the couch in the right way. Curtains are from Burlington Coat Factory.

Sofa table and lamps from Lowe's. In this shot you can see that our entertainment center hadn't been placed yet. These lamps are the same lamps sitting on either side of our bed now, but with different shades. Shop what ya got!!

Our handmade entertainment center.

This entertainment center was custom designed and made, by hand, by my Father-In-Law as our wedding gift. It is HUGE, taking up one entire wall in our living room, but it is loaded with storage spaces that I'm always coming up with new ideas for, and it is always a conversation piece when company comes over. I absolutely adore it.

In the Spring of 2010, we finally filled up the empty space in the red part of the room, which we had decided to turn into our own little music room.

Decor is a bit sparse in that area, as you can see!! haha!


For a while, honestly, nothing in the room changed, except for the placement of certain nick-knacks and the addition of wedding photos once we got them from the photographer.


We adopted a dog in 2010 who was a living terror. The three of us simply were not compatible. She created utter chaos in our house, so we surrendered her back to the shelter where she was promptly adopted by a family that she was compatible with, so no worries there! But because of her utter chaos, our geometric print rug was ruined (shampooing after shampooing did nothing to get rid of the smell). So we went ahead and purchased a new, more neutral one. I broke my heart to roll up my expensive rug and send it off to the dump, but I was so happy with my new rug that I danced for joy back down the driveway on trash day!

 

This is the best shot I have of it from that time. It's a cream color shag texture rug, size 5x8 from Wal-Mart and it was only around $80. A GREAT value. By this time, we had, clearly, adopted Tabby, who is the best behaved dog I've ever seen in my life. She'd rather explode than pee on this rug. 

We also got a new TV. The big one we had had earlier slap blew up on me one afternoon when I was watching a movie, so we got a new one, and unfortunately we had to basically sit the darn thing on the floor because our cabinet didn't have a TV stand built to match it. The one pictured above was a $30 put-it-together-yourself-er from Family Dollar. It served it's purpose very well for a good while, but we did so dislike the tv practically being on the floor.

 

This little TV stand came from a consignment shop in our town and I decided I wanted to put it here, to house all of our internet wires and cords and what not. Behind this table is where the only telephone jack in the entire house lives. 

 

 The "music corner" as we refer to it, filled up fast with music books!

Not long after the above photo was taken I finally took the plunge and painted over those red walls. And when we did, I changed out all the curtains in the room to a pretty cream set I found at Lowe's, of course.  You can see the difference the paint job did in the photo below. I repositioned my shelves (Family Dollar special!) and added a vase with some lit branches, both from Kirklands, in the corner, to lighten things up. (I started a trend, both my sisters in law now have something similar in their homes! :)

We re-purposed the red wood TV stand that had been sitting in the corner or the room, in front of the recliner, and actually turned it into a TV stand! We're wild like that, a TV stand into a TV stand... such rebellion! We had to saw the little nubby legs off of it to get it to fit, but at least out TV isn't practically sitting on the ground anymore! It made the room look much more put together!

It was so obvious. I don't know why I didn't think of it before!!

In 2013 we ended up purchasing new leather furniture (reclining sofa and loveseat!!!!) from Ashley Furniture, and a coffee table/end table set off of Craigslist for a steal! I'm in love with our living room furniture. It's US. It really is. And the best part about it is that with the right accesories (i.e. pillows, throw blankets) I can take the theme really modern or really country, or anything in between!

I'm slowly including more and more blue accents in my house, I'm simply obsessed with that teal blue color that is so popular in home decor these days. 

When I said slowly, I meant all at once. It feels like overnight my house went from tan and red to tan and blue. I love the blue so much, it's such a fun color and it makes me very happy! Aaron is the one that wanted the red in the beginning, not me, but now he's all about the blue too! We go to stores and he's like "hey, babe, wouldn't this blue sumthin-er-other look great in our house?" He's the best.


As of the present moment, this is what our Living Room looks like! (I will say this, the color of the walls is photographing MUCH darker than it actually is.) It's funny, I've been working on this post for about three weeks, and, because I've been working on this post, I've been really working on de-cluttering this room, and making it more open and airy. From the photographs I'd taken before, it became clear that I needed to rethink some of my decor choices. Including my el-cheapo Family Dollar bookshelves. No more words, here's the tour! (Excuse the gloominess outside. It's very rainy and yucky here today. So I've got Bewitched streaming on Crackle to chase away the yucky weather blues!)

 This is mainly my little area. I sit here, it's my "Sheldon Spot." (Did you catch that Big Bang Theory reference?)

 Our beautiful Entertainment Center is still as gorgeous as ever. Samantha and Endora were arguing over how to plant flowers at this particular moment on Bewitched!

Like I said before, I disassembled our Dollar Store shelves and put our least used books away into storage. The ones we use the most often I put into baskets and they are sitting in the corner.

Our lovely blue front door. At church I'm now known as "Lady with the Blue Door." As you can see in the bottom corner, we use the shoes in the basket method. It works very well for us. About once a week I go through all the shoes and put some away in our bedroom. Keeps me on top of the mountain!

Here's the main part of the room. We like big furniture, in case you couldn't tell.

Our couch, and the pillows that I think perhaps started the blue craziness. We got them at Kohls for about $10 a piece... marked down from $40 a piece. Yeah. It was a deal.

Recognize this table? It had been our entry table, but now it's a pretty little place for our phone to live. Yes, that's Germ-X, I'm a germaphobe. We keep our remote controls in the little basket that I bought in Charleston, SC years ago. And, of course, our beautiful wedding pictures above. I'm thinking about changing them to something a little different, but not sure what I want to do yet. I'll keep you updated! 

The piano area. I wish I had a bigger trunk. That one has all my childhood memories inside. 

This is the view you get coming down the hallway.


So there it is, folks! FINALLY my Living Room Evolution! I'm aware that my house isn't super fancy. I know that it isn't uber shabby chic. If my house could basically be Brooke's from All Things Thrifty, then I'd be a happy happy happy girl, but we just aren't there yet in our life. This is our first house. It's an old house. We are doing the best with what we have. But I am proud of the hard work we've done in making our house a home. Now, more than ever, I feel like this is home... for the time being. Thanks to fabulous people like Brooke, I'm always getting ideas for my house, and taking inventory and filing away ideas for our next house. That's what's so great about blogging. You don't have to have a cookie cutter house, you can get ideas and run with them in your own space. So Brooke, I doubt your reading this, but thank you for your amazing blog. My house would probably still be red and gold without you! 


Who's to say this is the end of the transformation for my living room? Certainly not me! 

I hope you enjoyed looking through the transformation of my living room and walking down memory lane with me.

Up next is the KITCHEN post. And... let me just tell ya, I'm excited to share it with you! 

So thanks a ton for stopping by! I'll see you next time on The Simple Life!