Kitchen Complete! (THE Last Kitchen Post, I Promise!)

It is so good to be back home and finally able to post on my computer. 

We've finished the kitchen---- actually, now that I think about it, it's not 100% just yet... still have a bit of trim to put up--- but it's close enough to write a "finished" post for it. It's so beautiful I just can't stop myself from sharing! 

Get ready for lots of pictures!

I painted the ugly, old, metal door to the laundry room a glossy "colonial red".

I really like the way it turned out. 

Love the light fixtures that were so kindly donated to us by a wonderful, local lighting company! 

After opening up this wall between the kitchen and what used to be our bedroom, we decided to make it the family room, and built this nifty little "double bar" area. We reused some of our wonderful shiplap/tongue and groove wood that we salvaged from the upstairs ceiling.  

Having colors in the kitchen is definitely something new for me. I've always been a strictly all-white paint, farmhouse style kinda girl. But I really, really love my new, old kitchen. 

Open shelving is also a new thing for me, and I just sorta threw this random stuff up there. I have more kitchen boxes that need to be unpacked and gone through. Everything was so hastily boxed up after the fire, that I'll need to take some time to sort it all out. 

If you look closely at the brown colored shelf/cup hanger, you'll see where it was starting to burn. It had been hanging on that wall where the fire was moving down into, from the room up above the kitchen. 

At the time the above pictures were taken, we hadn't refinished the original wood floor yet. Here are some pictures of that process:

Using an orbital floor sander with open 20 grit sand paper, we attempted to remove all the old nasty glue that had been applied, along with nails, when they had installed plywood and linoleum over this beautiful floor years and years ago. 

Some of the glue just wouldn't budge, even after getting down there ourselves and scraping and picking and peeling. But the majority of the floor looks great so we just decided to go with it. 

Two coats of polyurethane later, and I'm now even more in love with our kitchen than I was before!