More home improvements

This spring, summer, and fall, we've been adding some more home improvements!

The first was putting up this swing set for the kids, which I can see from my kitchen sink. It is so nice to be able to watch them play, and they make up all kinds of stuff to do out there. They swing, they play family, they move mulch around with trucks, they build forts, they do the monkey bars.

We tilled up this area of dirt, leveled it out, put down weed blocking fabric, built a small retaining wall, and filled the area with mulch. The play set itself was free from a family giving it away - it was a nice one but 10 years old, so Wade just fixed up a few places where the wood was rotting. It's good it was free, though, because all the materials involved in making a place for it sure added up!

If you notice in the first picture of the swing set, there is a dirt area to the right of it... this was the result of an unfortunate miscalculation of the size & best location for the swing set, so since this area was already dug & leveled out, we decided to make it into a fire pit! This involved building a larger retaining wall, with a French drain behind it, for which Wade shoveled & moved literally tons of gravel in the heat of summer. We got pea gravel (instead of trying to do pavers, which would have been so much harder & more expensive), and then the fire pit kit from Lowe's.

Since Wade built this in the middle of summer, we had to wait awhile to put it to use since it was way too hot for fires, but we've had people over, roasted marshmallows & made s'mores several times this fall - super fun!

Finally, we decided the house could use an exterior face lift, and we had some rotten siding repaired that needed painting anyway, so we had the whole house (siding & trim) painted as well. This is the old color - a faded pinkish gray.

And the back of the house with the old color.

And now! I love the way the darker gray & white trim pops and looks so much richer. We chose Sherwin Williams Dovetail for the gray and Greek Villa for the trim.

I especially love the back now that it's painted!

Kitchen Reno!

Just as we were embarking on our bathroom renovation last November, we discovered that we had a leak in one of our pipes under the slab foundation of our house (discovered by way of a running-water sound in the walls & higher water bills). Our plumber, with some additional sonar detection equipment, narrowed the leak location down to the pipe that takes cold water to the kitchen sink. Since the pipe was completely inaccessible under the house, he recommended capping that one off & running a new cold water pipe from our laundry room, behind the walls of the pantry, cabinets & stove, to the sink.  Because this repair was going to require moving all the cabinets away from the wall & thus removing the granite countertop, we decided to go all in & do a small kitchen upgrade too :).

This is what the kitchen looked like before. The dark granite was here when we moved in & it was fine, although maybe wouldn't have been my top choice. The cabinets were original to the house (1985) and painted white.

View from the breakfast area (which we use as a sunroom because there are several windows & skylights).

The night before the tear-out.

A couple pictures of the progress. It was a lot more work than even the plumber anticipated to run new water lines through those walls. He ended up running a hot & cold line and left the hot one not hooked up, so that if we ever get a leak in the hot pipe under the house, we won't have to rip out cabinets & countertops again!

It was a disaster zone for several days...

And now!  We got new upper cabinets (42" tall instead of the previous 29" ones we had), and added a cabinet there on the left-hand side on top. That one allows me to keep a lot of small appliances in the kitchen that had previously been stored in odd places in the garage (not very handy). The lower cabinets we had painted & got new doors to match the uppers. The granite is 3" longer than before to give me just a little bit more counter space (all we could do with the room's spacing & not adding support legs).

The sunroom area

View from the sunroom - new barstools because the two we had before were so wobbly & falling apart. We went with a medium gray on the cabinets & a very light gray on the walls to keep the space clean & neutral. The cabinets are a shaker style, and I really love the pulls we ended up choosing. They're nice & chunky but curved & smooth, and they mimic the shape of the refrigerator door handles & oven/microwave handles.

Our pretty granite! Wade talked me into going with this somewhat bold "statement" slab, with some unique black & gray veining, a little bit of green & some gold flecks. It's pretty sparkly in person in the light because there is some quartzite in it as well. And an undermount sink that I have wanted forever!

And last but not least, we got new French doors to the deck as well! The old door was terribly sealed, so cold air would just blow in around the frame in the winter. 

Disregard the mess on the deck, which is the next project we're undertaking... a play/swingset for the backyard :).

I love how much brighter the kitchen is, the extra cabinet space, and sweeping crumbs directly into the sink instead of over the lip of the sink - haha. It was an expensive fall/winter for the Tapp house, but I love the finished products and they do say kitchens & master bathrooms are the rooms where you get the most bang for your buck on resale. Hopefully we're not selling this place anytime soon though, because I want to stay & enjoy it for a long time!