Then & Now: Kitchen and Half Bath

(For the next two weeks we're celebrating our 3 year blog anniversary with a long overdue, fully updated house tour)

Kitchen
The kitchen was straight out of 1960 with outdated cabinets that had seen better days, a damaged enamel sink, ugly linoleum countertops and several layers of outdated wallpaper hiding crumbling plaster walls. Here’s the kitchen before:

The kitchen went from dark and run down to bright and cheerful. We painted the kitchen cabinets white dove, repaired and painted the plaster walls edgecomb gray, replaced the linoleum countertops with butcher block, tiled the backsplash with white subway tile, updated the window light fixture, replaced the sink with stainless steel and upgraded the faucet. We also added a moveable white kitchen island for more counter space. Here’s the kitchen after:

Half Bath
Long referred to as the “outhouse,” the small half bath left a lot to be desired. The walls were covered in peeling wallpaper with cracked plaster underneath. The cheap medicine cabinet was rusted and cloudy, the faucet needed replacing, the outlet awkwardly place, the only light an exposed bulb on a pull chain. Within weeks of buying the house, a plumber had to rip a hole in the ceiling to repair the bathtub drain from the bathroom upstairs. Then the pipe in the wall started leaking into the basement, thanks to a crack created by the previous owner’s love of 5 inch nails for every project. Here’s the half bath before:

We removed the ceiling light and installed one over the new medicine cabinet, putting it on a dimmer switch next to the new outlet. We installed beautiful tin ceiling tiles and put the living room wallpaper on the window wall for extra charm, then painted the wall color to match the yellow background. With some new bathroom hardware, it was a whole new room. Here’s the half bath after: