The house is finally on the market! A look at some of the renovation…

Five years ago, we decided that we wanted to get to the point where we could sell our belongings, our house, and move into our RV to become permanent travelers.  You can read about the whole story here.  Things have come to a head over the past few months, and we have been working hard getting our house ready to go on the market.  Since many of you have asked me about our progress, I thought I’d show you where we stand today and how we got there.

The house officially went on the market last week.  If you or someone you know is interested in moving to the Atlanta, GA area, be sure to check out the official listing.  My real estate agent, Trey Cooper, is awesome and we are hoping that his expertise and his background with Keller Williams Realty will result in a quick sale.

Yep.  I had to do a plug.  LOL!  But you know the internet makes the world very small, and you just never know who is reading and who might need a southern home!

So let’s take a look at the kitchen renovations…

This is the kitchen two months ago.  One of the things that influenced my decision to buy this house in the first place was the big open kitchen.  It has always been bright and sunny and spacious.  But as you can see it had become a little cluttered.  I love the western influence and decorated both my kitchen and living room with things that we had found when traveling in the western states.

In order to get the house ready for market, we needed to do a bit of depersonalization.  The first thing on the list was to remove all my pots and dried flowers which were mainly serving as dust catchers.

The eating area of the kitchen has a beautiful wooden table with matching chairs.  I have owned this set since my youngest daughter was a baby, which means they are over 20 years old.  These poor chairs have handled years of children, and messy spills.  They have literally been used every single day for over 20 years.  It was time for a make over!

I chose some fabric that I loved from the local fabric store.  We used fabric meant for upholstery.  It is thicker and bit more expensive, but well worth the investment.  Rather than trying to remove all the staples (there was a million of them) from the original fabric, I decided to simply cover the whole seat, old fabric and all.  I cut the fabric to fit, and centered the seat upside down, being sure that the stripes were straight.

I then pulled the fabric taught and stapled it with a heavy duty staple gun.

This little reupholstery job took about an hour and what a difference it made!  I then used Old English Scratch Cover to add a new finish to the table top and chair legs.  The dining set looks new!

The next step was to tackle the kitchen countertops.  They were originally solid surface and while I have no problem with that, they had cracked in several places which either required a repair or a replacement.  We decided to go with a replacement.  In order to help increase the value of the house a bit, we expect that the investment will be well worth it.

We generally do most things ourselves, but installing countertops was well beyond our capabilities.  So, we did a bit of research.  Turns out that the two major home improvement chains that we went to first, required approximately $2000 down in order to even come out and do an estimate!  Really?

They could only quote us square footage, and could not give us any pricing on removal of old countertops, cutting for sinks, stove tops, etc.  If we wanted a full estimate, we would have to put money down…

So we opted to go with a local company named, MC Granite Countertops, out of Kennesaw, GA.  We were able to go to their warehouse, pick out our granite, and get a full estimate before having to put tons of money down.  And they even sold us a cool sink to go along with it!

Another plus with this company was that they were able to cut the countertops and complete the full installation in a two week period.  This was mid October and both home improvement chain stores had told us that it would probably be Christmas time before they would be able to complete installation.

After the countertops were installed, we started the process of installing a glass/ceramic tile backsplash.  Note in the photo above that there is no sink faucet installed. That is because we decided that it would be much easier to set the tile without the sink faucet in the way.  Of course that also meant that we had no running water in the kitchen.

This didn’t seem too bad at first, but the tile job took a bit longer than we thought it would and all of us were getting really tired of eating out after a while.  Never thought I’d ever say that.  Ha!

Again, we went to the chain home improvement stores and were very disappointed at not only their selection, but lack of interest or ability to answer our questions.  So, we found ourselves at Tile & Stone Express in Douglasville, GA.  Not only were we very impressed by their huge selection, but the folks there were so incredibly helpful.  They walked us through the process, recommended grout colors and techniques and even rented us a good saw to cut the ceramic tile with.

I’d be lying if I said it was totally a smooth installation.  Because it was our first tile install, there was a definite learning curve.  We had to go back to the store at one point and get some needed advice.  They were more than helpful every time.  We have to say that we were very pleased with our dealings with Tile & Stone Express!

Our final installation in our new kitchen was a Moen Hands Free Faucet.   This cool faucet has sensors that know when your hands are under the faucet.  You hold your hand under and the water comes on.  This helps in keeping germs at bay and makes the sink incredibly convenient.  Not only that, but it looks cool too!

We changed out all the knobs on the cupboards to a black metal to match the countertops.  Finally, we added a coat of light beige to the walls to brighten the kitchen.  And our kitchen remodel was done!

Swing the camera around and check out the eating area!  Bright and sunny.

I’m kind of wishing we had done this years ago!

If you are interested in the listing and more photos of the entire interior and exterior of the house, you can find the virtual tour here.  We are hoping to sell the house in the next few months and then move onto the next big step.  We will be leaving Georgia in early April and heading for Bar Harbor, Maine!

Exciting!

(This was not a sponsored post.  I just wanted to tell you about a few awesome companies that deserved a pat on the back!)

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