a hole in the kitchen

I know it's been ages since we've posted, but we've got good reasons:

• We've been doing stuff (so there's a lineup of posts coming)
• My computer's motherboard failed and it's in the ICU (I'm using a loaner)
• We've both been slammed at work
• And sometimes doing nothing is awesome

So, with that being said, here's a sample of what's been going on:

• Guest room: Painted; decorating in progress
• Hallway: Trim and walls painted;decorating in progress
• Kitchen: Big hole!

Inspecting the beast's innards

Today we're going to talk about holes. Namely, the big hole in our kitchen. Our destructive tendencies continue here after taking down the upper peninsula cabinets (and just kind of leaving it like that). So, one Sunday, Mike got the urge to rip out the big, ugly, useless trash compactor while I began painting trim upstairss
I told him I'd ignore the scary banging and scraping sounds unless he yelled for help (or there's a loud crash followed by sudden silence).

It did sound pretty dire sometimes and it seemed the monster was putting up quite the fight. Then Mike called me down to show off the mess.

Pretty, eh? 30 years of dust bunnies came rolling out. 

There’s also a Pepsi can crushed in the back. Nice.

From the looks of things, this was once a shelf or cabinet before, since you can see where a shelf had been ripped out. And apparently the builders weren’t too fussed about giving this space a complete floor. Maybe there’s a secret stash of gold tucked away down there? Yeah, probably not.

a cleaner hole

Next, Mike primed the interior and took measures for rebuilding a shelf and trim facing. We’ll paint the interior with our sample of Sherwin William's Reflection and do a bright blue on the outer edge (to tie in with the curtains and rugs). We did think about installing one of those sliding shelves for a trash can and putting a funky door to make it a cabinet, but we like the ease of our new Force-activated trash can (and feeling like Jedi) next to the fridge, so we opted from open storage instead.

This, of course, meant Mike got to play with his new tools, including his Kreg jig.

Here Mike's dry fitting the shelf fronts and showing off his pocket holes for when he's ready to attach everything. But, of course, painting shelves is much easier if you do it pre-assembly. Since the shelves were fresh wood, we primed with our go-to Kilz Premium. The wood definitely soaked up the first coat, but the second coat evened things out. 

Our dining room continues to live in a state of limbo, as it's become the perfect staging area for in house projects. The wallpaper has been removed from two walls (to remove a delightful mauve), and the place has also become a secondary TV room (Ikea chairs, TV on folded dining table) when we've had friends with kids over. It's making us really debate what we want to do with the room. Do we go the formal dining room route, which looks nice and will be handy during family gatherings, or do we make it multipurpose, since it's a nice space for projects?

I'm exploring the idea of mixed-use/dining combo. If we got a little rustic with the table, we could definitely push it against one wall and use it as project space most of the time, and then transform it into a dining space when company's over. The box in the background is a red shelf/cabinet we got on sale a Target that could be some fun to the space as well as store stuff. Of course, our project space may move to the basement once there are rugrats running around, but I can see the dining room also being where they do homework and whatnot. Plenty of time to figure it out.