The Crider House Rules: The Crider Kitchen: An Evolution

I know you're dying to see more pictures of my kitchen. I sense these things, and i'm here to oblige. I hope you're ready for my Pictures folder to vomit all over the internet.

I don't have any pictures of the kitchen right when we moved in so you'll just have trust me when i say it was painted dirt brown with a big, dark, wooden valance/shelf right above the window and no blinds much to the dismay of my neighbors. (I was born without discretion, you see. It's my cross to bear.) There was also no hardware on the original-to-the-house cabinets. Lucky for the sellers, we're DIYers and we knew that regardless of the cosmetics - which can be always be changed - this place had pretty good bones, and that's ultimately what you want in a home. Write that down.

The pictures i DO have of the "beginning" kitchen start right after we painted it yellow and updated the light fixtures. Ok, almost all the light fixtures...we did end up replacing that hideous fan a short while later. This is also the only really good picture i have of our mustard yellow laminate countertops.

The dining set belonged to my lovely great grandmother. It's now in storage as we thought it to be too big for the space.

A year later, we re-did our cabinets and countertops. Our cabinets were terribly painted; you could see brush strokes, there were drips, etc. Had new cabinets been in our budget, we would have gone for that. But they weren't, so we made do with what we had and just painted them.

The pic below is more proof that i (1) can get my hands dirty and (2) can get a really good tan if i want to. And yes, that's normally-transparent me in the pic below. This must have been the first year we went to the beach without children, when i was able to spend some time on the actual beach, thus allowing for the aforementioned tan.

We went with laminate charcoal countertops. Sexy, versatile, and within budget.

Shortly after this project, we repainted. Took it down a notch from dandelion yellow to a nice seafoam green. (Ha...The Curse of Seafoam...) Needless to say, it took us a minute to find our footing on the color front. (Understatement.)

Then we re-did the floors on the entire mid-level of the house.

In an attempt to get a dining room table that made more sense in this space, we bought pedestal table from Ikea.We later Craigslisted it since it was a terrible piece of crap.

We took a long break after painting it seafoam and suffering through that round table. The next project happened during Christmastime in 2011: new cabinets, granite countertops, and a backsplash. For those of you that bear with my posts on Facebook, you might have already seen these pics.

Here are the new bottom cabinets sans countertops:

Once the granite countertops were installed (thus being the first thing we didn't do ourselves as it was literally impossible), we dismantled the top cabinets so we could hang the new ones.

We ended up buying lots of backsplash sample. Subway tiles, porous stone, glass, etc. We ended up with this lovely mix that we got at Lowe's.

Once chosen, we dropped our kid off at the grandparents for a night and got to work. We knocked it out in just a few hours as we had tiled three other rooms before this one and weren't strangers to the process. I know my way around a wetsaw if you know what i'm sayin'. ...No but seriously.

Normally i think it'd be dumb to wear a mask during this project, but i was five months pregnant with my second at the time and wasn't taking any chances. Better safe, yes?

Oh, and we also repainted (again!) to the lovely Chocolate Froth color you'll still see today.

The next projects, which you can read all about here, were the scarf curtain and the pantry doors where we went from floor-to-ceiling mirrored sliding doors...

To custom-made bi-fold doors:

And yet another table. Third time's the charm.

Moving on to the most recent huge changes which i'm sure you're all familiar with, where we halved this wall, stained the banister, and repainted the hallway.