Doodle Bug: Kitchen & Dining Room Reveal

Chocolate?
Does anyone have some chocolate they want to give me?
No?

I see how good our friendship is.

But I guess even though you won't give me your chocolate, I can still show you our KITCHEN!
And our DINING ROOM!

**Edit: The day I wrote this post, we had friends coming over for dinner. She brought me chocolate. She gets a gold star every day of her life :)

Yes, the time has finally come when you get to see a whole entire room of our house. The living room is nearly done, but you have to wait for that until after I get a sofa reupholstered.
Let's just say it's a bit of an "elephant" in the room.

Here are some before and after shots, and I'll give you a rundown of some specific things along the way.

The "before" pictures are from the day of our house inspection, while we were trying, trying to buy this house from a somewhat hesitant realtor/bank.
What?
Yeah.
First picture is what you first see while walking into the house. Overall, things were in decent shape. Just dirty. And Oaky. Is "Oaky" a real descriptor?
Here's what it looks like today.

We actually have had this chandelier for over 2 years. We were once looking for a house in Iowa, and I found this nice chandelier at a garage sale for $15. I thought "Oh, we'll be able to use that soon!"
Well, after two years of storing and hauling this thing around, it has finally found a home. And the scale of this one is much better than the little baby that was there before.

Next is a view from the top of the stairs that you saw on the right of the last picture

Awww, even Jip looks cuter in the after shot :)

And do you see our new sliding door? Much better! The old one had a pane of glass broken out of it, so it had terrible insulation. And the weatherstripping and wood had been all gnawed up, too. Again, we say "thank you" to our good buddy...I'll call him the "Old Man" because he'll appreciate that...for helping Joe install it a couple Saturdays ago.

Also from the top of the stairs, here's a view into the kitchen

* Please ignore the pile of dishes on the counter. They're clean, I promise*
And here you can also see the Striped Bench...that mysteriously never made it into the shop to be sold. Strange thing, that is.

This is the kitchen, as seen from the dining room.
Gettin' the hang of the layout? Good.
Because if you break into my house, I would hate for you to get lost.
Seriously, don't break into my house.

Here you can see the Kitchen Island, built by my handsome hubby. Click on the link if you'd like to see some detail shots.

Also, check out my super-duper roller shade in the window above the sink! I just made it about two weeks ago, and I'm pretty stoked about it (do people still say "stoked"? Now that I typed it out again, it looks stupid).

Slick, huh? If you want to make one of your very own, it's not difficult. I followed the tutorial from Design*Sponge found here. The only part that they didn't explain was how to shorten the roller blind to fit your window. I found those instructions here. And if you're like me and you found a fabric you love...but it's lightweight, not medium like they suggest, you can do what the cool people do and iron on some heavy-duty interfacing. Hooray!

Lest you think that all we did was paint the walls and trim and windows...and that led to so much more light bouncing around, I would like to direct your attention up. To the ceiling.

EWWWWWW!!! Do you see that nasty ceiling? EWWWW!
I think I almost had a conniption fit when Joe starting putting up the new ceiling paint.
And now that our ceiling is "bright white," it bounces the light around like crazy. Which means we don't use lights during the day very often, and we only need to use a few at night. I love that.
That plus the light wall color and white trim, and the house feels much more fresh.

My amaryllis is almost done blooming. So much for waiting for Thanksgiving, huh? It's been really beautiful this year, though. 5 blooms in total, can't complain about that.

So there's our kitchen and dining room!
I'm still not sure if we're going to put something on the dining room wall. And what it might be.
And I don't know if I'm going to end up putting something above the cabinets in the kitchen.
Perhaps I need to start collecting plates...
Or grapevines.
I hear those are all the rage.

Sorry, I'm getting snarky.
Probably because you wouldn't share your chocolate.

I'm off to go make bread and a mess in the kitchen now, though. Good thing I cleaned it for these pictures!

If I don't get a post written next week, have a wonderful Thanksgiving! I have a lot to be thankful for this year. A gracious God, wonderful husband, perfect little baby to meet, loving family and friends, a new home, a puppy, and the list goes on...and on.