Reno - Work Day #1

The ugly valance above the top cupboards is coming down!! I have wanted to do this for a long, long time. CJ was opposed to doing this but I am sure glad we did. It is amazing how much larger and brighter the kitchen is with just this first small change. The ceiling will require some repair and refinish but I think it is totally worth it!

Next, out come the range hood and the top cupboards.. Did I mention the we have decided to go ahead with moving the position of the appliances?? The fridge will soon be located on the left side of this wall. Demo is kinda fun! Except for the mess, that is... Oh well, it will all be worth it!!

This is where the range will be located... with an over-the-range microwave above it. I can't wait for these horrible dark cupboards to be painted. Next comes some wiring to move the plug behind the stove and to put one in for the microwave.

Decisions, decisions

It seems to be more difficult than I thought to come up with just EXACTLY the right things to do in order to make this house more salable. Thanks to the fridge deciding to stop cooling, we now have the new appliances we knew we were going to get eventually in this process. We still need to decide if we are going to do a re-arrangement of the kitchen by basically changing where the fridge and stove are located. It would mean just a bit of work to move a couple of cupboards and repair one small section of wall. We are going to be painting the cupboards and I am still trying to decide if I will re-use the old doors or if I will get new ones to update the look a bit more. A complete new counter top will also be on the list and, again, I am not sure what to use there.

We are also discussing the possibility of removing the carpet from the main areas of the house and putting down laminate flooring. I'm just not exactly sure if laminate is a good idea in the kitchen or if I should be staying with vinyl in there. I am not a huge fan of tile in a kitchen but it is a consideration as well. We are leaning towards keeping the carpet in the bedrooms at this point.

Then, we get into the topic of paint... do we paint all the interior doors?? Right now, they are just stained a kind of medium dark ( 1970's) color . I think they would look better painted white as well as painting all of the wood trim in the house white. CJ is concerned that the old wood grain will show through the paint and look strange. The doors do not have a distinct grain as they are made of something that looks perhaps like mahogany with a very fine grain, not an obviously distinct "wood" grain such as you would see in oak.

All in all, there is a lot of work ahead of us.

Changes

Nothing is ever certain in life, it seems. I was settling in to life in Chilliwack even though the space in which we were living was somewhat cramped. Spring had arrived. I was certainly enjoying seeing all the cherry trees bursting into bloom and the weeping willow trees adorned in their spring green along the avenues. The changes in the housing market everywhere has caused a "rethink" of our current situation.

With my house in Alberta not selling in the 5 months that it was on the market, we made the difficult choice of leaving the lower mainland of British Columbia and returning to Medicine Hat, Alberta. Our timing to travel pulling our 27' trailer worked out quite well as, shortly after we arrived back in "The Hat", all of western Canada was hit with a huge winter blizzard depositing large amounts of snowfall in a relatively short time. Perhaps The Creator felt that I needed to experience a bit of winter in order to remind me that I have quilts to be completed!

The plan now is to complete some renovations, reduce what has been in storage and to do a lot of painting in the house. We have already managed to clean out and rearrange much of what was stored in the garage... something that probably should have been done before the house was ever listed. Need any yarn???

The list of all there is to do is long and will require time. Our hope is that, once the work is completed on the house, it will become a more attractive prospect to buyers. Hopefully, the market will also recover by the time we are ready to relist.