In Progress

Guess what? I finally have some "after" pictures of our new home to share! But before I do I figured I'd share a few "in progress" shots we took.

Our first task was the kitchen. I knew right away that I wanted to paint the kitchen cabinets white. I've always loved the clean look of white cabinets and since we definitely didn't have the budget for new cabinets, we tackled the process of painting them ourselves. And a process it was.

As we started to take things apart we realized what shape the cabinets were in and how badly they needed painting. The insides of the cabinets hadn't had attention in years. At one point they had been painted this lovely seafoam greenish color.

Shelves and walls were covered in contact paper. Oh how I've come to despise contact paper. It was like traveling through time when you looked at all the patterns they had. The leaf pattern you see below was the 90's edition. We also had the white geese from the 80's, funky bright green floral/clover from the 70's and a classic silver and white pattern from the 50's. The fun part came when we realized that the contact paper on the wall was to cover the crumbling plaster. That white spot you see below? Crumbling plaster. Yay!

Our solution to crumbling plaster? Plywood. I think a few contractors, and cabinet makers out there just collectively shuddered as I said that. It probably wasn't the proper thing to do, but it worked.

Now onto the bathroom. This wasn't so much of a project as an interesting tidbit of information. Here we have our old medicine cabinet. I'm a fan of big mirrors myself and this cabinet was pretty old and dated so we wanted to replace it. Well after hearing what my dad had to say, I was a little timid to replace ours. Have you ever noticed the slot in the back of your medicine cabinet?

Like this?

As soon as my dad saw that he said, "I bet there are a bunch of razor blades in the wall back there." Whaa, why? Apparently my Grandpa always told him that's where razor blades were meant to go when they were dull so they wouldn't hurt anyone in the garbage. At first I wondered how this could be true since, where would they go? Just into the wall? That couldn't be, there isn't any sort of receptacle that they are stored in for easy removal later.

I wondered if this was something that my Grandfather had been told by his father and told my father and was assumed to be true.

Then my coworker found this: The Concept of Away.

I guess it was all true. A designer back in the day thought it would be a great idea to give people a place to put their old razors. Maybe he had been cut one too many times from old dull razors while digging in the garbage? Growing up in the 90's and in the middle of Reduce Reuse Recycle and knowing that away isn't away, this is an odd concept to hear.

And now we come to the fateful moment. Are there razors in our walls? Did the previous owners of our house shove years of dull rusty razor blades down the back of the medicine cabinet?

(Here is where I could show Mark what our walls were actually made of. Living in a 100 year old house is new to him.)

All clean, no razor blades!

The previous owners must have known that away wasn't away. Or maybe their fathers never told them what that slit in the back of the medicine cabinet was for.

For that we are thankful, I'm not sure our tetanus shots are up to date.