The "Before" Pictures

When we bought our dream house last July, we talked about doing lots of things with the house--eventually.   

We  are now getting to a point where we are mostly unpacked, and doing something small around the house is a possibility. Jason used to be a professional painter, so I know he has been itching to repaint the very-amateurish paint job the previous owners did all over the house.  

However, we once watched a show on HGTV where the owners stripped their whole house down to remodel, then ran out of money and had to live in that indefinitely.  I KNOW I don't want to make that mistake, so I really want to focus on one room at a time.  I've read from multiple sources that the kitchen and the bathroom get the most "bang for their buck" when it comes to remodels that increase the value of a home (Which makes sense because they are also the most expensive rooms to remodel!) and after we visited friends who had recently remodeled a bathroom and saw how much work goes into a bathroom remodel, the kitchen made the most sense to start with, especially since I spend so much of my time there.

Right now the kitchen is functional, but bland.  All of the appliancesaere adequate, except the damn oven which takes FOREVER to reach temperature, and all of the appliances are the same color (black):

      

What the kitchen looked like before we moved in.

It is a fine kitchen, plenty of room and lots of potential, but it is boring and does not suit our personalities.

As you can see, the walls are a horrible mauve-y 80s awfulness that made me want to claws my eyes out of my head every time I saw it.

The company that staged the house used this bizarre choice for a table.  The table was in the corner of the room you can't see to the right of the top picture.:

This picture also helps show the mauve-y awfulness of the walls.

From the moment I saw this house, I wanted to buy it.  And from the moment I saw this corner of our eat-in kitchen, I knew it needed a nook.  So after we moved in, I badgered my poor husband to let me get a nook, even though he was very opposed to it.  I found one on Craigslist for under $100, and just like that we had a nook:

Try to ignore the sweet potato that has sprouted and now grows in our hanging basket.

My husband has learned to live with the nook, and I haven't killed the dogs for EATING my nook (they are puppies so they are teething on everything), so this is what that corner looks like now.  I know, your next question must be, "Where can I learn to keep a house that clean?" But that is a blog for another time.

Now that we are unpacked and the home stagers have gone back to wherever they came from, this is what our kitchen looks like when its actually in use:

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

And obviously we do not have enough storage space, even though we also have these to help with storing all of our kitchenry:

Yes, those are my husband's practice swords. 

Doesn't everyone store their practice swords in the kitchen?

And this was still not enough space for storing all of our crap, so we added a pantry, a microwave cart, two dog kennels, and a table to the previously too-empty-to-bother-photographing-before-moving-in wall:

After we moved in.

So since we've been living here for six months, we felt like we knew the space well enough to start making some more permanent decisions about organizing, decorating and using the space.  I also spend most of my days in the kitchen, and having the walls a color I hate is not a huge motivator to go cook.  The next thing we have to do is plan the kitchen (That blog is coming soon!)