DIY Renovation of our First Home's Kitchen and Dining Room

I want to start my first blog post on my exciting new website (that I've been toying with starting for... at least five years now) with our first DIY project. It was a really big one to attempt on our first go. But we were in our early 20's- nothing daunted us!

I was in college and my husband (fiance at the time) Challie was (and still is) a Fire Fighter- which means we both had a good amount of time on our hands. We had just bought our first house. Built in the 1950's, it was 1,500 sq ft, and a perfect first home. It came with the obligatory 50's dated pink bathroom and pea green kitchen. So we rolled up our sleeves and got to work!

We gave ourselves a budget of $2,000. This is the before:​

The first thing we did was to pull up the dated linoleum tile floor and lay down nice clean tile (the best we could afford).

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That's our dog Zoe! Awww she was so young there! Note the muddy feet - she loved digging in that big backyard. 

Next we demo'd the kitchen. Actually this is the one part that we paid some construction workers to do and were grateful we did. It looked hard! They tore out all the old tile. We went to Seconds and Surplus in Dallas and bought some gorgeous granite tile (much cheaper than a large slap of granite and close-to-the-beautiful effect). 

 While Challie worked on the counters and backsplash, I was in the garage refinishing the cabinet fronts. I'm particularly proud of this part (and keep in mind this is pre-Pinterest!). I used a jig saw to cut pieces of beadboard about 2" smaller all the way around and glued it on with wood glue. Then I took small wood trim and cut it like a picture frame and glued that on too. I kept the drawers plain/flat. I filled any gaps with wood filler. Sanded, primed and painted them a glossy white and added new pulls and knobs.

​We painted the walls a gorgeous blue paint from Restoration Hardware (my favorite line of paint)- courtesy of our friend Jeff Bahrenburg who started his own painting company in the DFW area "Signature Painting."

The last steps was to go shopping at Ikea: we purchased and installed a deep farm house kitchen sink, faucet, pendant light, chandelier and... VOILA!

We ended up selling our house almost immediately after we finished this project and turned a tidy profit, in large part due to our renovations I'm sure!