It’s time for you to see my current house!

It’s a cabin in the mountains, the complete opposite of the last house in a busy town (and in walking distance of all the good amenities). Now I’m off-grid (solar, wood stove, well water, septic) and I love it.

The woods have overtaken the back yard, but once I get the trees cleared, there is a beautiful valley and mountain view from the whole house.

I’ve been here for a few years now, but I’m only sharing and the pictures from when I first moved in in this post.

Thankfully it didn’t really need many repairs, mostly just cosmetic stuff. And a lot of that is still left to do, but it’s coming along.

The good part about only having subfloor is that I don’t have to pull up any flooring to put down good stuff.

It’s essentially a one room cabin, but it’s pretty big at over 1,600 square feet (bigger than the Victorian).

The bedroom is a loft over the kitchen and it overlooks the bar/dining room and living room.

The bar was one of my favorite features, it’s made of one giant slab of wood from the property with live edge on both sides. And it has a working tap, with all the hookups for a keg in the basement. Sadly I’m allergic to beer, but I have been thinking it would be cool to put a barrel of water down there and have sparkling water on tap.

The house was built as a hunting cabin, and then the builder/owner decided to live here full time, so he added on the living room and all kinds of cool features.

As is always important to me, I want to keep the original intent of the house in mind when finishing. It will remain a masculine hunting cabin, just updated.

The house is currently a sea of orange with all the aged wood, but I’m working out ways to tone it down and will NOT be painting the walls. But all that orange right now…wow.

The kitchen really needed a lot of work. It had mismatched cabinets that didn’t fit in the space. The vintage fridge was so cute, but sadly it wasn’t in good enough condition to use anymore and the quote for restoring it was many thousands.

The kitchen is totally different now, but it’s not finished so you can’t see it yet. I purchased a second-hand kitchen of Facebook Marketplace and altered everything to fit. The appliances were replaced with vintage-look new ones.

Project posts will be coming soon!

The post The New House: a Mountain Cabin appeared first on Little Victorian.

We finally finished our galley kitchen remodel! In the last post about it, it was being demoed. I was hoping to have project-by-project posts, but instead here’s one giant before-and-after post.

We’ll start with the “After”, then the “Before” from the dining room.

From the living room (after):

And before:

Guys…this one tiny room completely transformed our house. It went from a 6′ wide closet of a kitchen to a place where everyone wanted to (and could!) be.

We were finally able to enjoy cooking together again.

There were still some things we didn’t get to, like the backsplash we had planned, which would have really warmed the room up, and replacing the main light fixture, but we’re still pretty pleased with how far we did get!

The layout changes

The biggest change was obviously ripping out the wall. A galley kitchen just wasn’t going to work for us. We built an island where the wall used to start. Not only was it way more open, but we could also now access the kitchen from more than one spot.

We also swapped fridge and stove positions to further open things up.

The cabinets

The cabinets were a huge score. One day we randomly went into a Restore (by Habitat For Humanity) second-hand store hoping to find some art for the dining room and ended up with “new” kitchen cabinets.

They had been the showpieces at a nice cabinet store…which meant they were never actually used, but it also meant that they had all the upgrades like olive wood drawers, amazing slide out cubbies and baskets, built-in spice racks, tiny bonus cupboards on the ends for small items, and more.

They came in a really nice gray, but while I intended to paint them black (and already had the paint), we ran out of time.

So the cabinets were very affordable, and as we love, we opted for open shelving on top.

The island was super fun to do. Since space was really limited, but we needed more storage, we used some of the upper cabinets for the island as they are only 15 inches deep. The Hubs built a base fastened to the floor to attach the cabinets to. Here’s a video of how to build a sub frame if you’re using wall cabinets for bases, so you can get a visual of it.

Then we used a regular depth countertop which overhung perfectly for counter-height stools.

We put veneer over the sides and backs of the cabinets and then painted them with a custom color to match the rest of the cabinets.

The cabinets were the perfect depth for pots and pans and all those random kitchen items.

The floor

We pulled up three layers of flooring down to the original hardwood, but sadly it was way beyond repair (looks-wise!). We weighed our options, and decided to go with the very affordable, very fast peel-and-stick vinyl.

If it wasn’t that, it was going to be real tile, and we didn’t have the time or the budget for that at the moment.

We put down new subflooring on top of the hardwood for a clean surface to stick to. Then it’s just a project you can work on for a couple hours a day until it’s done! At least that’s how I do it.

A big thing I love about peel and stick is that because there isn’t nearly the time and financial investment, I’m not afraid to go bold.

We used Achim Geometric pattern tiles. I loved them.

The appliances

The big splurges were the fridge and stove, though we did wait until they were on sale. We went with black stainless steel (since the lower cabinets were supposed to be black).

We started buying counter-depth refrigerators years ago, and just can’t go back to standard depth. Less food gets lost in the back, AND it just looks so much better and saves that much more room in the kitchen.

The range hood was from Amazon. It was more affordable there, but it was a little frustrating to install with the way the sleeve was designed.

The sink and counters

The sink was special to me. Since we were going to go black on the cabinets, I also wanted a black sink to sit on the marble-look counters. We found this single bowl sink from Kohler and paired it with this gorgeous (and affordable) gold faucet.

The counters were our old favorites from Ikea. We got shock and disbelieving comments from both a pair of designer friends and from realtors that were visiting when we told them they were IKEA. Highly recommend!

The pantry

The pantry was a huge change too. I can’t currently find an image of what it was originally but…

The door to the right inside the kitchen was a little hallway with a door to the back yard at the end.

When we bought the house, that hallway had three closets in it for pantry-type storage. It was clever, but a lot of the spaces were awkward and because of the doors, things would pile up and get messy in there really fast.

So we gutted it.

We didn’t want to take out the walls as well, but they were plastered within an inch of their life and it was just not pretty.

So we took it all down and started with fresh drywall.

I always wanted a butler’s pantry, so we built one. And it was so much more functional! It was also a great place to store dry goods, which is always the one thing missing when you go with open shelves for uppers in the kitchen.

We also removed the door so it would flow better.

The pictures aren’t that great because it’s such a tiny space (and we left in such a hurry), but there were two full lower cabinets and one extra large upper hanging above them. Then we had more open shelves, and an open section underneath for a trash can and rain boots.

We didn’t keep detailed records, but including the splurge on higher-end appliances, we estimate the whole remodel at $15,000. The biggest costs were the appliances and then the building materials (the wall we ripped out was load-bearing, so we needed to put in a lot of quality materials and care there).

So worth it to go from the very cramped galley kitchen to a big open one for a couple who loves to cook and entertain.

So there it is! Our years-in-the-making galley kitchen remodel!

Pin this to your house inspiration board.

Hover over the image and click “Pin”

The post Finished 1940s galley kitchen remodel appeared first on Little Victorian.

The $100 Room Challenge is wrapping up today! Unfortunately, I can’t quite call this a “reveal” since I still have some work to do. Most of the delay was due to rebuilding the gutted pantry and kitchen at the same time.

But here’s the room this morning, and then a month ago!

Let’s just pretend the fireplace surround is painted charcoal already.

DIY Mantle

We removed the giant floating mantle and the Hubs built the new fireplace surround from scratch (we’ll do a post about it in the future). It still needs to be primed and painted, it will be a darker gray when it’s finished.

All it took to build was 5 boards, fasteners we already had on-hand, and the French cleat that we stole from the back of the old mantle to secure it to the wall.

DIY Art

This was one of those projects you’ve seen on most DIY blogs: a “blueprint” or “engineering print” from Staples. You can get a photograph printed in giant format for really cheap. Of course, it’s not meant for photographs, so it comes out looking grainy, but that look was fine with me for what I had in mind. I was hoping for something that looked old and modern at the same time, and the graininess did the trick.

For the frame, we used 2 1x2s, miter cut and fastened together.

I have lots to say about this project (including when we were getting ready to hang it and our dog stepped right through the picture and put a giant hole in it), so a post about it will be coming.

Rug

The rug is one we’ve had for many years. Unfortunately, even though it was a pretty pricey piece from a higher-end store, the ends started fraying pretty quickly.

If any of you have dogs or robot vacuum cleaners, you know both are drawn to anything fraying like magnets and make it their mission for the day to help in the unravelling process.

So the rug had to go away before it was completely torn apart.

Getting it repaired properly and officially would be in the many hundreds, and honestly that’s just not something we’re interested in spending hundreds on. So I bought an upholstery needle and wool yarn that matched and started stitching the ends.

It’s going well, but it’s time-consuming, so I still have A LOT to do. In the meantime, the really bad end is tucked under itself.

Dog gate

We wanted something more modern and more user-friendly than the big metal baby gate, so we built one out of a crib railing that we got for free from Facebook Marketplace.

There’s a post with the details here.

Accessories

Curtains were also from Facebook, just $10.

Plants were collected from other parts of the house.

We removed the Craftsman style sconces, and replaced the light fixture with one we purchased for our office area, but didn’t end up using, so it’s been sitting in a closet forever.

So the official total was $93.14!

Here’s my wish list from the beginning:

• Repair the black and white rug that’s supposed to be in this room, and swap the tan one out for it
• Paint the walls
• Paint the trim (decided not to–still debating)
• Remove mantle
• Build new mantle that actually surrounds stove (still art deco style)
• Replace light fixture(s)
• Custom doggy gate at the front door
• Complete curtain and blinds set on the window, hung properly (curtains, still keeping an eye out for blinds to go underneath)
• Custom radiator cover to replace metal one (under the window) (removed the cover and like it much better, still hope to build a simple, modern cover eventually)
• New bar stools for island (honestly probably won’t happen this month–and definitely not within the $100 budget) (was hoping to makeover the ones we had for a few dollars, but didn’t have time)

So we got 2/3rds of the wish list done!

Now go check out the huge differences the other ladies made with just $100 too:

The post $100 Dining Room Makeover Progress appeared first on Little Victorian.

We are still mid-kitchen remodel (thanks to 2020–update coming soon). But since the kitchen is now open to the dining room and it’s pretty much one space, we wanted to fix it up a little too.

$100 Room Challenge time is MY FAVORITE time to do that. Because, it clearly only costs $100 and it’s so much fun to see what you can do with just that much money.

So here are the “Befores!”

Not long after moving in, I broke the mini blinds that were on the window when I tried to close them…apparently too enthusiastically. And the temporary curtain we put up is STILL there.

You can see we have a couple cabinets hanging out in the room. Those will be going into the soon-to-be butler’s pantry.

We have an art deco mantle just hanging out mid-wall. And art deco/craftsman ceiling light and sconces.

The sconces are tricky. I love sconces in a dining room, but it’s way overkill with overhead lights there as well. Plus they are way too high up the wall. So I’d like to remove one set, either the overhead or the sconces. This is a tough one for me!

And teal walls.

The color is actually nice. But I just don’t personally do teal walls, just not “our thing”. You can see the black and gray I’ve been testing.

My wish list is huge for the room. Not expensive stuff, just big projects, so I doubt we’ll be able to get to them all, but hopefully at least a few for this challenge:

• Repair the black and white rug that’s supposed to be in this room, and swap the tan one out for it
• Paint the walls
• Paint the trim
• Remove mantle
• Build new mantle that actually surrounds stove (still art deco style)
• Replace light fixture(s)
• Custom doggy gate at the front door
• Complete curtain and blinds set on the window, hung properly
• Custom radiator cover to replace metal one (under the window)
• New bar stools for island (honestly probably won’t happen this month–and definitely not within the $100 budget)

Here’s a sample of my Pinterest inspiration board for the room (a soft black/charcoal and white, as usual for me):

The $100 Room Challenge is a challenge that anyone can join, just makeover a room for $100 and share your progress on your blog. Everyone that joins can link their posts together so we can all hop from blog to blog getting really fun inspiration (and be amazed at what you can accomplish with $100).

Here are the rest of the participants for this challenge:

The post Mini Dining Room Makeover Before appeared first on Little Victorian.

Last week I posted about remodeling the kitchen. Here’s the story on why this all started.

Back in November (yes, it’s MAY), we were going to host Thanksgiving. Days before, the main sewer pipe in our house rotted through.

I was downstairs doing laundry when water came down from upstairs and rocketed out the back side of the pipe and onto the wall of the basement. Not good.

Our current house has only one bathroom, and it’s on the other side of the kitchen, so the main pipe runs down the wall between the two rooms.

The bathroom is still vintage tile wall that we don’t have any interest in ripping out. The kitchen however, we wanted to gut. (At some point…later down the road…many months or even a year from this point…) But one of the walls had to go.

Kitchen it was. Days before Thanksgiving for 10.

We patched the pipe up enough to give us a few days to demolish cabinets so we could get to the wall.

The dresser posing as cabinets came out first, then the breakfast bar.

After that, we removed 5 layers of drywall and paneling (!) to get down to the studs so we would have a lot more room to move around in there.

And the wall was going to go anyway.

Then the stove came out along with the cabinet that was up against the back wall and we finally got to the offending pipe so it could be replaced.

The uppers are also down now, the fake brick and the drywall are also gone, and that’s where we are right now!

Next is removing the studs and putting a header in (the wall is load-bearing), then putting drywall back up on the back wall.

After that, we’ll put in the new cabinets (still have to wait until we can actually purchase some), countertops, new sink, and appliances.

The post Kitchen demo appeared first on Little Victorian.

You guys haven’t even been introduced to our “new” house yet, hopefully that will come soon, but you’ll meet our kitchen today.

It’s T-I-N-Y.

Tiny 1940s galley kitchen.

Here’s the kitchen from the dining room minutes after we signed the papers for the house (we showed up with bubbly and the pups to celebrate, and found that the sweet previous owners left us bar stools, wine and dog toys-so sweet!).

The house is a complete mish-mash of styles, the cabinets are colonial, the backsplash is fake brick, while the walls are cape-cod-style paneling. Light fixtures are a mix of 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

The kitchen is so tiny that the previous owners very inventively put a dresser in it for some extra cabinet space. But it’s just too tiny to be functional in the way we like to use a kitchen (together and a lot).

Here’s after we moved our things in and replaced the teeny-weeny fridge:

Of course, I promptly covered the “merlot” laminate countertops with contact paper (which you totally need to try if you need a quick, cheap and pretty sturdy makeover $5 guys. Five dollars.). They’ve been in place for a year and I love them just as much as I ever did.

Look at the FIVE DOLLAR DIFFERENCE:

Anyway, it’s all going away.

Plans are:

• No more wall between kitchen and dining room
• New appliances
• Swap places with fridge and stove
• Island with storage and seating where divider wall is
• New cabinets

Design plans:

Black, white, and wood tones. Like so:

(Click on picture to see everything on Pinterest.)

More details forth-coming, but we’re planning on doing a lot as we go as so much (like cabinets and countertops…) is unavailable at the moment.

The post 1940s Kitchen Remodel Before appeared first on Little Victorian.

Our MCM (the Prairie house as we call it), was our dream house. We even considered getting the blueprints from the original owner’s son so we could re-build it when we moved. (But with our mobile lifestyle, there wouldn’t be enough time for that!)

The Story

To recap our MCM story: we purchased it for a STEAL back in the mid-west. (The local real estate office literally didn’t know what a mid-century modern was and just called it a “unique” property. They thought the real selling point was the view of the farm across the street.)

When it was first listed for sale, we immediately ran out of the house and called and emailed the realtor while we were on our way. We knew it was already vacant, so we walked around like creepers peering through the windows.

Not only was the house amazing, it had a special story. It was custom designed by an architect in 1961–who had studied Frank Lloyd Wright style at the same school that Wright went to–for his aunt and uncle. We were only the second owners.

We intended to start restoring it right away, but 6 months after moving in, the job that moved us out there very unexpectedly ended. After 3 years of job struggles in our dream house, we were only able to get small (to us) projects done.

When the Hubs job offer came through from New England, we had ONE MONTH to pack, start and finish projects like replacing laminate flooring, a minor kitchen reno, bathroom reno, and then put it on the market and move.

The MCM Living Room

That fireplace! The brick work was so beautiful. The Hubs’ father even mentioned that the bricks were some special and expensive variety they used to use in Milwaukee.

Then of course, the amazing copper sheets…

The fireplace itself was about 5 feet wide, and there was a nook for firewood to the left.

And the wrap-around floating concrete hearth…

The Dining Room

The movers had already come and packed up most of our stuff by the time I took the listing photos of the dining room, office, and kitchen, so it was prettier with real chairs of course, but you get the idea here:

The MCM Kitchen

The house still had the original wall oven and stove top, and we still used them until our last month in the house. We wanted to replace them individually, but time and money didn’t allow.

So we turned the spot next to the fridge where the wall oven was into another cupboard and put our very nice KitchenAid range (that I miss very much) in.

We purchased the matching dishwasher and fridge when we moved to the area. (In case you’d like to know, we liked the range–though it could have been better, loved the fridge, h-a-t-e-d the dishwasher.)

They all sure looked good though.

This was a built-in desk with peg board off the kitchen that we turned into our coffee bar and recycle center. Perfect height for a shorty like me.

The Office Area

This was at the end of the dining room. (You can see it was before we put the new floors down!)

The MCM Master Bedroom and bath

You can read more about that here.

The Guest Room

Unfortunately, we did nothing to the guest room, not even paint.

And the Main Bathroom

You can read more about that here–the before was CRAZY.

Some “Before” Pictures

You can read my first post about this house here. And see all of our posts about the MCM here.

The post Our Mid Century Modern tour appeared first on Little Victorian.

Waaay back in week 3 of the fall 2018 One Room Challenge we were making over our bathroom. I had a post written about our progress, but before I could publish it, we got big news: we were moving across the country again.

There was no time to hit publish. There was no time for anything but a mad rush to finish our renovations at the highest quality could, pack the house, get the MCM on the market, and move to New England. In one month. Our usual fashion…

So here is the original post I had written back in the fall at the half-way mark of the One Room Challenge:

Once we pulled out all the rotten drywall and built a wall between the tub and the powder room, it was time to finish it. 

What we WANTED were mother-of-pearl tiles.  Because that’s what was originally there (though in plastic form), and because it’s gorgeous.  However that would have cost us well over $1,000 just for the tub.  Definitely something we would have saved for if this were our forever home. 

But it isn’t.

2019 edit: Ha! Good timing to think like that.

And while keeping the home close to original is very important to us, we can’t go overboard in over-improving.  The fact is, this is still, and always will be a two bedroom house, and number of bedrooms, baths, and location trumps any improvements you make no matter what “they” say.  We’ve lived through it twice…

So…well over $1,000 or $144 for a shiny new, fast, and easy plastic tub surround that will be covered by a curtain anyway?  

Yay for plastic tub surrounds!

We got it up and caulked in just a few hours.  I didn’t get pictures of the process because it took both of us to put the panels up.  But it’s just putting adhesive on the backs of the panels and pressing them onto the wall.  

We weren’t able to replace the vanity like I was hoping, but we did replace the counter top with a nice one from IKEA.

Sorry again for the low-quality photos…as mentioned, we were in a mad rush.

The floor is obviously new as well. And we took out the medicine cabinet and replaced it with a nice big mirror from a thrift shop.

Here’s how it was before we bought the house:

Then after our super-quick reno:

We didn’t add up the cost, but it was under $500 for the new wall, tub surround, countertop, mirror, paint, flooring, and accessories.

I’ll be sharing a photo tour of our whole house as we moved out soon.

The post Affordable bathroom reno (the after) appeared first on Little Victorian.

We got the dividing wall up in the bathroom, and our house officially went from a 1.1 bath to a 1.5 bath.  It’s week two of the One Room Challenge!

The shower had pretty cute mother of pearl plastic tiles on the two walls.  But the bottoms of the walls were rotten underneath, so they and all the very hard glue they left behind (the brown stuff in the photo) had to be chiseled off so we could save the drywall on the top halves. (Wow that part took a long time.)

The tub is rounded on both sides, so we couldn’t just make a wall that butted up to the tub, we had to overlap the tub a little with the studs.  

We framed it out, and put up water resistant drywall.  

We were of course hoping that this would be a one-day project so we wouldn’t be without a shower, but of course things didn’t go as smoothly as we hoped.  We purchased cement board to use for the walls, but it was SO difficult to work with that it was taking about 5 times as long as usual. 

There wasn’t time to go back to the store that first day, so we had to go without a shower.  Thankfully, the Hubs is awesome, and when we first moved in, he set me up a dog bathing station in the basement.  Complete with a nice hand-held showerhead, and easy hot and cold adjustments.  We have concrete floors, and he placed the station right between two floor drains.  

So we showered in the basement.  

Because the Hubs had to be back in the office all week, there was hardly any time to work on it, and it took all week.  But it’s done!  And it’s solid, quality work.  And it’s good to be showering in a shower again.  

Finishing the tub area is up next!

The post We have a wall! And a 1.5 bath house. appeared first on Little Victorian.

I’ve mentioned our…unique bathroom a few times here and there.  But you haven’t gotten to see it yet.  Because it’s been awful.  

The reactions–including ours the first time we saw the house–are always a blank stare in utter confusion, and then laughing.  

Here’s the listing photo from when the house was listed for sale:

Yeah, that’s not a mirror behind the tub, that’s another toilet and sink.

When the house was appraised before we purchased it, the appraiser put down that it was a 1.1 bath house. ?

The toilet and sink on the other side of the tub make up the “Powder Room” that we made over last month for the $100 Room Challenge.  Obviously, it looks a little bit different now.  

There was no way we wanted to have overnight guests over with that room (and we like to have guests often), so we put up a temporary wall between the tub and the second toilet shortly after moving in and we’ve been living with it that way since.  

It was all temporary though, because the other 2 walls around the tub were in bad shape and needed to be replaced, and we wanted to do something better than the plastic 1960s tiles that were in there.

The bathroom also has a cabinet built in.  The cabinet actually goes all the way through the wall, with doors in the hallway behind it too.  It is nice, but it is so awkward-looking as it is.

So, it’s perfect timing for the fall One Room Challenge!  This makeover challenge doesn’t have a dollar limit, just a time limit of 6 weeks (5 to do the work in).  In all honesty, we did get some things started already.  Nothing is even close to finished though.  Next week, we’ll show you the temporary wall, and the demolition of it, and the putting up of the new wall.  After that…here’s the plan:

• New vanity
• New sink
• Replace medicine cabinet with mirror and light fixture
• New flooring
• Repaint ceiling and walls
• Something to make the cabinet wall look less awkward

The post The World’s Weirdest Bathroom appeared first on Little Victorian.