Have I emphasized that we're crazy enough yet? Well, one thing that we knew we wanted to do was to remodel the bathrooms like we did at the old house. Nothing really wrong with them, but they were all pretty basic - standard cabinets, outdated vanity tops, contractor grade finishes, and so on. Well, when we started looking at flooring, we realized that the best time to redo the bathroom on the first floor was now... while the flooring was being torn out anyway and painting was happening. So we ripped out the existing vanity and toilet, let the flooring and painting happen, and then (with the amazing help of my dad and Leslie's dad) installed a new vanity, faucet, toilet, light, mirror, hardware, and everything else. We still have to put up some towel bars (it's a full bath, so need something for bath towels I guess) and could probably stand to replace the shower fixtures with ORB instead of chrome as well, but those changes aren't urgent. The whole thing really came together well - we got the vanity and light from Wayfair, faucet and toilet from Lowe's, new vanity hardware from Menards, and mirror from Target. We think it's a pretty cool looking bathroom and was a nice little project we could finish pretty quickly.
Another quick project was the pantry. One of the things we reeeallly wanted was a nice, big pantry. Boom, got it. But... all they had in there were some of those cheapo wire shelves (actually I don't know how expensive they are... all I know is I don't care for them). So we immediately ripped those out and had the painters patch and paint in the pantry so we'd have a blank slate to work with. I then got a bunch of shelf brackets and prefinished shelving material at Menards and built shelves to our own specs (22" from floor to shelf 1, 16" from shelf 1 to shelf 2, then 12" per shelf up to shelf 6, which is then 16" off the ceiling - the top shelf is also larger and is for holding less-used, big items like an extra slow-cooker, an electric roaster, an ice cream machine, etc.). We then got some spice rack things from IKEA and put those up on one of the smaller walls to hold all our various spices and rubs and whatnot. I then finished it off with some pegboard which will end up holding things like aprons, brooms, and probably my grill/smoker stuff (spatula, tongs, smoker hooks... that sort of thing). It's a simple pantry, but man... I'm proud if it and am so glad to have all that space now. It's pretty great.
Of course we've been up to a few other things... but they aren't quite done yet, so I'll save them for another post later. But hopefully that's at least a bit of what's been going on over here these days. Thanks and see you next time!
