A little much

So we may have bitten off a tiny more than we can chew with our kitchen project, but we're excited about how it will end up. In the meantime, we have quite the mess.

(so yeah, not gonna have time for my fun fashion re-do posts for a loooong time. What was I thinking?)

RJ started tearing down the plaster wall on Thurs and had it mostly down when my mom and dad came to help on Friday. Plaster dust =  disaster. It got INSIDE of my cupboards which gave me the joyous job of hand  washing every single dish I own. Still have some left to do. I guess they wanted to make sure I really earn my dishwasher, huh? 

The boys got a lot done though! Next step is getting up some dry wall and then onto the floors. 

Here's a before picture.

And here's the after. It's hard to really get a good picture with the fridge there (it's won't stay there) but this is my most favorite part of the room. They gutted the little space between the living room and kitchen and took down the part of the wall above the doorway making it seem HUGE! 

 You can also see the chimney there, which we were hoping to leave the brick exposed, but it was covered in plaster so my dad trimmed it up with wood and then we'll drywall around it. I'm also excited about this because now I can have some exposed shelving on the chimney. Wa Hoo!

Here's another before shot of the wall that is no longer here:

And an after shot, looking in from the dining room:

We'll be putting a long island to cover up that whole space with lots of COUNTERTOPS! Our stove will go in island and our fridge will go where the stove is.  The doorway to get from the kitchen to the dining room will be to the left of the chimney. 

We still have so much to do, but what RJ and dad got done this weekend was for sure the hardest/messiest part.  We have the living room taped off with plastic in the doorways so it didn't get dusty, so the next few days I'm going to clean, clean, clean, so we can take down the plastic down and live a semi normal life in here. 

Hopefully we can be completely done in 2 or 3 months??

Here's a picture of the floors. There are 4 layers of linoleum and 2 sub floors ON TOP of the wood floor. That's 6 layers of flooring, folks. The plan is to get new wood floors in the kitchen and dining room, but we're pretty curious to see what the original wood floors in the kitchen will look like.

Isn't that retro orange floor brilliant? We could also see parts of the wall showing that it had been painted bright orange to match. Psychedelic!

Thanks for all your help, mom and dad! You're the best.

Finally on Sunday afternoon we were ready for some fun. We ended up having Harper's birthday party at Caribou since our house was too messy. (her actual birthday is on Wednesday) You can rent their little meeting room by purchasing a $25 gift card, which we ended up using to get everyone's drinks. Isn't that a slick deal?

Here's Harper with her uncle Aaron during "Happy Birthday".

The girl and her cake.

All the Bloom cousins and one more on the way in May.

We all headed over to the Iowa Energy game afterwards too. It was a crazy busy weekend, but lots of fun too.

Hope you all have a great Monday and enjoy the warmth!