Buh-Bye "Naughty" Pine

Fireplace and Wall Before

When we first laid eyes on the kitchen and living room, we were drawn to how cabin-esque it felt with all its knotty pine paneling (so naughty!). Yet we also knew we would rip it all out and build anew. It's funny how things go like that. If it was a real cabin, we might have kept some of it, but it made the space feel too dark and the house was crying out for new life. Painting it didn't feel like a good option because those knots are very hard to block from bleeding through paint.

Floors and Walls Gutted

What living in a renovation really looks like.

 A toilet can appear in any random room in the process.

You are also likely to spot bottles of iced tea around the destruction, uh, I mean, construction.

While the fireplace looks a bit antique in the before pictures, the bricks were nothing special. We believe they were done in the 50's like all the other "updates" to the home, so we didn't feel guilty covering them with several coats of stain-blocking and heat resistant paint. We kept the little box on the right of the fireplace, which is a match holder, and the swing-arm on the left for holding a poker stick. We loved the hammered iron doors, so Bobby painted all of it a fresh black and had fire-rated glass inserted into them.

New walls in and fireplace painted.

matches holder

poker holder

fireplace after painting and new glass

hammered iron doors

We liked that there were built-in bookcases next to the fireplace so after removing the old ones, we decided to put new ones back and carry them across the wall. We chose to do very simple Craftsman-style bookcases which Bob built from scratch.

We used white cabinets from Cabinets-to-Go for the lower part and then my husband custom built the bookcases on top of them. We used salvaged wood for the shelf in between as well as for the mantel above the fireplace for a rustic look.

Seems I took this almost "after" picture just shy of putting the last cabinet door on. Oh well, you get the idea. If you look closely, you'll see that's our game cabinet. Still love me some Rummikub!

 

bookcase shelf

fireplace mantel

Deciding how big to make the opening for the tv was really the only source of debate for us. One of us would have been happy to get a ginormous tv that took up the entire wall (been there, done that with the last house). Sorry, sweetie. We're not running a sports bar here. It's bad enough that we have a tv in every room, though I admit I'm a Netflix addict like everyone else. Still, we ended up with a pretty big tv opening, so I think it was a good compromise.

I'm not ready to post the final "After" picture yet since that's coming in a future post, so here's a side by side of the "In-Progress Before" and the "In-Progress After." 

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