Couple design pics...

I wanted to post a couple of pics of what our island will hopefully look like soon after our floors are down and some of the design inspiration that my friend Lisa gave us to create a new more updated look in our space. Hopefully looking at some of these will keep thoughts of where we'll be in the next few months inspiring me while we have no floors and a bit of a mess in our house right now.

The new island that Rick designed will still leave us with a nice workspace overlooking our family room but will allow for 4 seats (mine, Rick's, Ryan and BB2) and the end is a bookshelf for all my cookbooks. Its also going to be a worn black to give a bit of a contrast to our new floors. The 2nd pic shows what the counter will look like sitting on the new base. So in the end we'll have almost 8 feet of island space for cooking, eating, drawing, homework, hosting friends/family, and all around life and I can't wait because as I've mentioned I love a kitchen/family room where you can really live on a day to day basis. We spend 95% of our time in this space!

The pic on the right is of the mood board that my friend created for us. If you've ever been to our house or checked out some of the other pics our house right now is a bit country and now we are trying to make it feel more fresh, modern and contemporary but still warm so all of our furnishings will be pretty neutral and we'll bring in some fun fabrics in drapes, pillows and accessories. We're also adding a cool desk of some sort on one wall where my trusty MacBook will sit so that the boys and us can do homework, play games, or just surf the net. Above the desk will be some shelves to keep some fun knick knacks and maybe some our original artwork by our resident artist Ryan Beley.

First weekends results

So after the first weekend most of the downstairs of our house is now covered with a lovely layer of dust which no matter how many times I wipe for some reason seems to reappear the very next day. Who knew that sawing tile would make that much dust? Obviously not me!

Oh well, in the end it should be all worth it. Rick continued the demo of our old floors and has made a huge, albeit dusty, dent in getting a big portion of the floor up. We are still trying to figure out how we'll get the tile cut that is up against the cabinet but hopefully a tool Rick bought this weekend will do the trick. Being a newer house the builder laid all the floor down first and then put the cabinets on top of the floor making removing these tiles so much more fun! Since we aren't putting new cabinets in (have been thinking about painting them at some point though) we have to cut the tile out as close to the cabinets as we can.

The picture on the left shows just some of the dust that has layered our kitchen and family room.

First day of demo...

The first thing that we needed to do was get all of our old flooring up, which is actually alot easier said than done we are finding out. We had carpet in our family room that needed to come up and then linoleum tile that we discovered was 2 layers thick in the remaining space. Lucky for Rick he has a great assistant helping him with some of this project. Ryan, our 5 year old, is seen here taking some of the trim and 1/4 round off. He did a great job!

Here is the first few square feet of the floor removed of the 660 ft that need to come up! Little did we know how much dust would be created by getting all this floor up. Rick had to saw lines all over the floor to score it to make it easier to get up. This was done after work so it's slow and steady for now. This past weekend saw a lot more progress and as soon as I get those pics off the camera I'll post where we're at after the first weekend of work.

Hardwood floors, they can't be that hard to install?

That is what I thought for the last 3 years since we moved into our house in PA. One of the things we loved about our new house vs our house in NJ was the open feeling that it had. We love that we can be cooking in our kitchen and still hang out with people in our family room. One of the things we didn't like was that there was this 1/2 wall between that kitchen and family room space so one day almost exactly 1 year ago I was saying to my wonderful hubby "wouldn't it be great it that dumb 1/2 wall wasn't there and we had one floor running through the entire first floor to totally integrate this space into 1 large great room type feeling?".
Well lo and behold after going out one day I come home to find the 1/2 wall gone which leaves a hole in the drywall and part of the flooring missing, so our journey to remodel/update our kitchen/family room space was to begin almost a year later...

I was lucky to meet a friend who is an interior decorator who further inspired us to get our project in gear. She had helped us with some decorating on our living room and had come up with some ideas and a mood board for our family room. Aside from redoing our floors we had also talked about expanding our island to fit our growing family. Our kitchen island is the one area that probably gets more use than any other. We eat breakfast there, check email there, chat with friends there and of course cook there. So with the addition of one more to our family to make it a nice even 4 we wanted to expand that to seat 2 more people and connect the space a bit more. Redoing the island was also something that my friend Lisa (the decorator) suggested as well.

So in addition to new floors Rick came up with a design for a new island that will hopefully be built and installed not too long after the floors gets done. Then our next task will be redecorating the family room to give it a more contemporary yet family friendly and warm feel.

We wanted to start a blog so that we could document all of the changes since this is the biggest home improvement project we ever done ourselves (really its my hubby doing most of the work, I'll do most of the documenting since I'm almost 8 months preggo).
This is an overhead view of our kitchen and family room, to the left is our eating area that is kind of like a sunroom with windows on all 3 sides. We love eating here and looking out on our yard.

This is the delivery of all the wood, all 37 boxes. Rick had the fun job of bringing it all into the house, where it now sits in 4 different rooms of the house waiting to acclimate.