Some renovation photos

So I'm a bit absent because we're renovating DH's study/office/ our main storage area for all the things but i never shared the before and afters for the kitchen we did ourselves near the end of last year (DH is an engineering academic and now an expert in ikea kitchen building and installs, and i need to remember to title a layout with one of his quotes at some point 'it's just like lego for big kids') and main bathroom a local mob did a few months back (and then we had some electrical issues that dragged out so i didn't really take after photos because we just had a wire hanging over the vanity.

anyhow i like seeing 'before and after's so i'm sharing in case you do too.

it's also been interesting from a scrapbooking standpoint because i didn't really think about all the colour and texture and product choices we make to create a page is a skill that you can transfer to decor and interior design.

i'll add more photos in another post below
- the pink tile /maroon and black granite counter bathroom was circa 1990's

kitchen (and adjoining laundry now) below
https://the-lilypad.com/forum/threads/some-renovation-photos.88782/#post-1535594

 

1990's kitchen (it's a galley kitchen, this photo is over the pensinsula bench with more wooden arched cupboards and sink)

new two-tone kitchen ( we kept the appliances except the dishwasher as there was nothing wrong with them - the grey matt colourblocking is continued on the facing cupboards along under the sink (the peninsula grey side has a quartz bench with greys & mirror flecks that are hard to photograph) but the white gloss and timber laminate bench matches the laundry, which is thru the sliding door and it's kind of a butler's pantry and was my kitchen during the reno process so it kind of is a continuation of the colours and style because they're adjoining spaces)



(which reminds me we haven't painted the doors yet - they'll all be closer to that 'behind the stove/ bathroom wall' tile, light kinda latte/tan colour)


**** back again with more pictures - this gives more the total galley overview and my laundry before and afters from about June last year

(the laundry was a trial run with ikea cabinetry before committing to a big DIY kitchen reno ourselves so DH knew what he was in for; it really dragged out because we planned on using more shaker style cabinet doors (in a glossy polyurethane finish in the more creamy 'antique white' colour that was their standard, the plan was a warmer 'modern country' feel) and we thought the hold up on getting them was still covid/shipping related, until like 4-5mths down the track when we went to order kitchen doors and someone told us to rethink the whole thing because the factory where that particular door was made burnt down (still not sure if that was true but we ended up taking back the one 'antique shaker' door and getting the flat panel, bright white with integrated handle doors in the 'after' photo and using the same doors for the kitchen, and it became a lot more clean and contemporary, and more modern European looking - the whole thing's been a long process after switching out carpet for click together wood-look flooring in the rest of the house the year before, moving furniture & just all the stuff between rooms so much feels almost like moving house, but that's DIY renovating - at least the study is moving faster, no plumbing etc! It's now in the chaotic organisation phase.

 

i have definitely thought about how that transfers into the clothes i buy and mix and match but it became useful and really obvious the more i looked at different flatlays and pinterest inspo!)

 

(Can I ask what happened or why the wall needs repairs? We had a big hole next to our old kitchen sink since we moved in in 2010- the people before us moved the sink to put a dish washer in & just put a piece of a different benchtop in over the dishwasher, I don't know if they tried to get a match or the bit they cut when moving the sink didn't fit, but we had a cream brown bench and a dishwasher-sized pink grey green piece that I covered with a teatowel & dish rack since we moved in. It wasn't even the same thickness as the cream brown bench and was 'sunken').

We didn't change the floor tiles (i know it's really a first world problem and given housing crises and hyperinflation etc but i really don't like the diamond pattern on our floor - the dark grout makes the pattern so obvious but the pinky colour is almost a warm neutral and while that's fine, they look more grey because they're bumpy & scrubbing them on my hands and knees is the only way they get properly clean and we have about a third of a tile as a 'border' that drives me nuts and it limited our cabinet placement to the 'footprint' of the old kitchen - the peninsula goes beyond the border and it's obvious but the tiles run all through the 'hall' from the front of the house through to the back connecting bedrooms etc and would have been too expensive and disruptive to replace (and painting them to matching the grout and make the diamonds less obvious i also ruled out,it'd make the whole house so much darker so we just decided to live with it).

We replaced the original backsplash tiles ourselves in a mini-reno in about 2013 (we changed out appliances and doorknobs and that backsplash/splashback had a few tiles creating a 'still life' picture of a cooking pot and onions etc right above the old stovetop and so we put in the mosaic rectangles and plain cream square tiles that are in the 'before' kitchen pic at the top - it was my fave thing of the 'before' kitchen. We discussed using a glass panel backsplash this time- easy to install (except for power point cut-outs) & easy to keep clean because no grout- but i wasn't interested, it was too modern looking and my wishlist 'zellige' looking tiles DH ruled out on grouting and cost (even the knock-off kind because they are have been trendy for the last few years), and using more quartz was not-budget friendly either. If your tiles are ok or you can patch up a few of them on the wall, painting them might be an option for you?

If you do buy tiles from a 'showroom' or online, find out if they are all as displayed or come in 'variations' in the box/palette because the bathroom floor tile was a shock after i saw it installed. the wall display is below - it looked more flat grey (it made me think of a LynnG solid paper really, scrapbooking really impacts how i see the world) and because we only saw one on the wall, we just thought they all looked like that, nope, it's more 'super dirty concrete or chalkboard' or one of Paula's Bleach Papers; which is not a bad thing, it's just not what we expected from the sample (bottom left)



i thought it just needed proper cleaning but nope, that's after cleaning. In the end, i'm finding it's easy to look after because it's always dirty looking, if that makes sense and i just keep telling myself, 'it's texture and a nice contrast to the shiny wall tiles' - the wall tiles were all the same in the box, no variations, and i ended up liking them (they have a small speckle print that looks like water droplets on glass so works perfect for a wet area) and we had enough leftover to use in the kitchen (after the tiles we bought specifically to use in the kitchen were again a 'variations' pack and had waves through them that we couldn't make work visually, because the one we saw on the display wall had a small wavy line through the middle (like wood grain) whereas the rest of them had half circle waves and we had them on the loungeroom floor shuffling them around like puzzle pieces for a good few weeks, trying to make them work visually with what ended up as very clean linear style cabinetry and just couldn't - so they're still in the garage with so much other stuff and taking them back is not an option really)

 

thanks everyone, i added a few more photos with the laundry in the kitchen pics post above https://the-lilypad.com/forum/threads/some-renovation-photos.88782/#post-1535594 - the more i look at the glass doors, the less i like them, we just had open shelves (cut down Billy bookcases there before but open shelves are not great with free-range birds, everything is a nesting spot) and i kinda wish that section (which hides our 'dropzone' for keys and bags etc if you watch all those organising people on Youtube, it's to reduce benchtop 'hotspot' clutter) was all white or all grey instead, but that's what we have for now (and they were discontinued doors so we went to 2 different ikeas hours apart to get all 4 of them which, combined with budget, makes keeping them a kind of a no-brainer decision but it's kinda the one thing i'd change in hindsight)

 

would you believe it's been in since easter and none of us have used the tub yet? (it's only being used now just to hang towels over because (we suspect) DS broke the new towel rail thing (it's now just decorative and hanging on by a thread, the technical thing that goes in the wall is busted and it looks like we'd have to patch the wall and put a new double rail in higher or lower instead - i thought the kids were old enough now we could start having nice things again but no, he's been 'Destructor' since he was little and apparently 'Mr. Nobody' broke the towel rail, b/c both kids claim it wasn't them and they just found it that way etc - sigh - it was a great new perfect bathroom for about a week after our lighting problem was fixed ).

We're all shower people really but there was a thread here in Chatty, a few years back about whether a main bathroom needs a bath in a family home and it was a fairly overwhleming 'yes' poll, and when we bought this place, DD was in kindy and the bath was important so TLP was part of the deciding factor in the bathroom design (and the fact that the space is huge and would have looked weirdly empty with no bath) but even if we haven't used it, i appreciate so much that cleaning this new one is so, so much easier - even with the 'extend a pole' squeegee thing i used to use to clean the old bath, it was literally a pain and the shiny old floor tiles made everything so slippery. I'm really hoping the black is as timeless as i think it should be. The 'pink mould' on the old white shower was terrible to clean with the sliding, stacking door; the swivel door on the new one makes cleaning so much easier too - the shower is also a fair bit taller than the old one, DS is still growing and was starting to have problems fitting under the stream of water and kept angling it to suit him, but DD wanted it lower, so the dual head thing meant a bit more financial outlay but less arguments.