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Adding Decorative Details Without Breaking the Bank
For years (maybe even decades) I have drooled over kitchen magazines. The designs that really made my heart sing were were the ones that featured lots and lots of finishing details. I love classical Roman architecture, so anything with pillars, corbels, detailed molding and carved trims make me very happy. I’m the opposite of a minimalist. I like details and lots of them…but guess what? Details are really expensive, especially in the kitchen. For instance, the corbels offered by the company that made our cabinets were going to cost $300…each. Well, you can’t have just one corbel holding up a counter, so we were looking at $600 just for one…
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Ernst Family, Tear Down Those Walls
Extreme Home Makeover: Ernstopia Edition Who hasn’t watched “Extreme Home Makeover” and wanted to just throw a sledge hammer through a wall? I know I have and although we didn’t have a sledge hammer the crowbar is equally gratifying!We saw no need to pay a bunch of construction workers to come over and tear out the kitchen when we had three willing and able kids who would do it for free! I might venture to say they would even pay us to rip out more walls! As you can guess, they loved every minute of it! Not wanting to be left out of the fun, I hopped up on the…
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Good-Bye Old Stove
Demo day three and now it’s starting to get serious. I packed up my dishes, spices and vitamins from the upper cupboards and watched as the guys tore out the cabinets. There’s no turning back…we are officially ripping out major parts of our kitchen…like this old wall oven. I think this oven officially qualifies as vintage…and not the good kind of vintage. Besides the smaller interior, this oven boasts a sill operational flip-down clock. I’m certain that’s not the official name, but you know the kind I’m talking about. It’s not a clock with hands, it’s not digital, the numbers actually flip down as each minute or hour passes. It’s…
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The Wall Comes Tumbling Down
And just like that the wall is gone! It’s hard to see in the picture, but the amount of light that we get in the kitchen now that the wall is gone…why didn’t we do this sooner?? Both rooms are significantly brighter. What looks like a total mess is actually a significant improvement. This was a huge step in confirming that our decision to open the space was the right choice. I don’t even mind the mess. Honestly, we are just amazed at what a huge difference this makes!
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And So It Begins…
Somebody pinch me!!! We just started ripping the kitchen wall apart, a messy job for sure. With our initial design in hand, we knew how we wanted the kitchen to look visually, but we needed to answer some questions first before we could put our plan into action. In order to open up the wall permanently, we need to determine if the studs were weight bearing or not, so Dan decided to make an exploratory hole in the wall to locate the studs. Once it was determined they were weight bearing, we had two options: leave the studs where they were or move them to the outer edges to be…
