Carolyn’s Therapy Sessions

Here is a picture of how our bathroom looked when we bought the house. It had no shower! And the toilet in the picture is the same one that we kept, except that you can see the handle is still intact.
Here’s a picture of our bathroom after it was completely gutted and redone. Except for the toilet. I don’t know why we kept the old toilet. Did we really want to save 70 dollars? But as you can see, a new glass block window and a working shower!! Two very nice things. Our bathroom looked like this for most of the 5 years we have lived here. No decorations, white walls, nothing special at all. (Never mind about Scott being in the tub with all his clothes on! I had to dig up an old picture of our bathroom and this was the best I could find. Scott is about 2 in this picture and Amy is 4) Moving right along…..

Ta Da!! The new bathroom. And look at that fine new toilet. Don’t you just want to take a seat?? The sink and the medicine cabinet are the same. What has changed is the wall color and the accessories.

Our bathroom is really tiny so it wasn’t exactly easy to take pictures of it. I had to stand in the tub for this one. But at least you can see the wall color better and the pictures I hung up. If you want a better view of the finished bathroom I guess you’ll have to come over and visit us.

On to the kitchen!! When we moved into our house the kitchen was just plain white. Nothing special. So Dan and I really wanted to spice it up with a bold color. We really went out on a limb to make a statement. We chose a deep red shade and thought it would look super fancy. We soon learned that we aren’t so great at making color selections for walls. The kitchen walls ended up more lipstick pink than dark red. What were we thinking!!?? It took us forever to paint it “red”, at least 3 coats of paint. We kept hoping that if we put another coat on that it would get darker. It just got uglier. In true Miller style we just couldn’t get the motivation to fix it. Our kitchen stayed red/pink for about 4 years I think. Again, I had to dig up an old picture for you to get an idea of what it looked like in there for so long.

Bright, huh? The walls made our white refrigerator glow pink.

Finally we buckled down and decided to finished our kitchen. Another problem with the kitchen is that the cabinets were hastily painted by the previous owner. In other words, they did a terrible job and the paint was pealing off. So we had to do the huge job of stripping the cabinets. Dan did all of the cabinet stripping himself and then he enlisted the help of friend Aaron Olmsted to sand all the cabinets. Our kitchen looked like this for quite a while:

Super bad times. Talk about an embarrassing kitchen. Since Dan’s job was to strip the cabinets it was my job to paint them. I don’t have an in between picture of that event but it also took several days to get done. Dan installed new hinges and handles on all the cabinets. Then we set to the task of painting over the red. It did take us a while to decide on paint colors. We were a bit burned by our previous bad selection of paint colors.

Here’s a picture where we’re half way done with the walls. We had to prime over all the red and we selected a tan color for the bottom half of the wall. You can see the color swatches taped to the wall. We were trying to decide on a shade of blue.

Here are the finished wall colors.

And finally, the finished kitchen. I just finished painting under the kitchen cabinets a few days ago. The painting in the kitchen has been mostly done for a few months, but we left the part under the cabinets unfinished. We had hoped to install a tile back splash. But since we just need to move to a bigger house now, we decided to let the next home owners deal with that. Now I can finally say it’s all done. It’s still not a very neat and tidy kitchen. You try to keep a kitchen clean all the time with four kids! No easy task my friend. What a wild ride that was. Our bathroom and kitchen look awesome just in time for us to out grow our home. Sigh.

Is everyone still with me? I didn’t lose anyone along the way did I? Whew, OK. Well thanks for taking this updating journey with me. I hope you all had fun. I’m exhausted!