Our Love/Hate Relationship with Ikea

We seem to have a love/hate relationship with Ikea, the huge blue & yellow warehouse of Scandinavian goods. The love comes from the great design, the reasonable prices, and the plethora of home, design, storage and needless but cool goods. The hate comes from the quality of Ikea goods (which is often not the greatest) and the fact that most items need to be assembled by the buyer, sometimes resulting in a mental breakdown.

For now, our relationship is currently in love status. This month, we purchased and installed a full set of kitchen cabinets for the 1st floor from Ikea. Ikea has a great downloadable online tool for planning your kitchen installation, which really helps the process once you have the exact measurements. Here are a few before pics of us doing the measurements...




Once we planned the set-up using the online tool, we made a day trip with Big Red (the pickup truck) to Ikea to pick out the kitchen cabinet style, countertop style, and cabinet hardware. And, a day trip it was! We stayed so long that we had 2 meals in the cafeteria. Patience is truly a virtue when you are shopping with your significant other at Ikea.

Once we got home and unloaded Big Red, we had to catalogue all of the items on our receipt to make sure that all pieces for our DIY kitchen cabinet installation were included. Let's just say there were a lot of pieces involved. Then, Tommy spent the free time of the following few days putting together the cabinets. Amazingly, it only took a few nights of work to assemble them.

Then, when we had a full day to devote, we installed most of the cabinets. Check out the progress...




The next step was finding a sink that would fit in the constraints of the corner. We found a black beauty at Home Depot. Tommy carefully cut the hole for the sink...

It's centered, right??

Tommy on the phone discussing our beautiful new sink
and knocking out another hole for the faucet.

Installing the sink and hooking up the water connections

A kiss for the handyman of the house

And, the completely installed kitchen cabinets and sink!
The DIY work was well worth the results...don't you think?

DIY baby

My husband is amazing. In less than a year, he has replaced all of the windows in our house. Now, at times he had support (mainly moral) from me or his Dad or capable friends, but most of the windows he did solo. Talk about DIY, baby.

Front of house, windows looking into the basement. There's some space for a very shallow flower bed in front. Not that pretty now, but I can't wait until next Spring.

In addition to the new energy saving windows, we are now firm believers in insulation. Much fun was had insulating our house over the course of a few weekends. We started (with the much appreciated help of Tom's Dad and sister Eileen) by doing the 'green' insulation thing. We rented a blower and bought 24 bales of recycled material to blow in the walls as insulation. Doing so covered everything (including us) in a thick layer of grey dust. I wish I had taken pics of that so that you could also feel the hilariousness of that situation. We followed up the 'green' insulation with some pink money. This is a pic of our fully insulated attic. So, I'm counting on much lower heating bills this winter. Please oh please oh please.

The kitchen: Part One

The kitchen: Part Two

Tommy getting down with some trim paintin'

This is the 1st floor bathroom (see Scary Before Pics) that Tom renovated. New tub, toilet, sink and tile. Quite an improvement, no? Check out that tile work.


Our back yard is much more hospitable now. The over-grown thorny rose bushes are long gone...only to be replaced by basil, tomatoes, mint and rosemary.

And the star of our tiny backyard: this pink-flowering crabapple tree. In the winter, it retains those pretty red berries. It flowers for a few short weeks in the Spring, but it's just lovely.

A little DIY of my own: I bought the wrought iron table and chairs at Salvation Army and repainted them with a little white Rustoleum

The Scary Before Pics

Although Tom could see the potential in this fixer upper 2-flat in Logan Square, I on the other hand, was a bit more apprehensive. On the day that we closed on the house in the Fall of 2007, I spent several hours in bed sobbing. But, I came around to the notion that with a lot of elbow grease, some DIY spirit, and a little love, this is a place we could be proud to call our own.

Welcome to our Work in Progress!

This is how 2 of the bathrooms looked when we bought the place. Since it was in foreclosure, the house was vacant for several months. During this vacancy, junkies/vagrants destroyed the wall and tore out all of the metal pipes, plumbing and any other metal scrap they could get their hands on.

A lot of damage for a little bit of scrap metal. Thanks jerks!

The kitchen sink area of old plaster and lathe and cast-iron pipes

The 1st floor kitchen cabinets...full of dead cockroaches. Super yum!

Boarded up windows and a view of the back of the house

A view of the back yard from the 2nd floor
The former tenants and/or junkies left a lot of stuff behind in the house and in the garage. Tom and I, as new homeowners, had an exciting weekend doing some demo. We filled a huge dumpster with junk in 3 days.

The over-grown and extra thorny rosebushes in the back yard. We spent Labor Day 2007 cutting these down with long sleeves and very thick leather gloves.

The ancient (circa 1950ish) non-functioning gas furnace in the basement that needed to be replaced. Scary, no? Freezing temps in Jan08 sent us into a new furnace frenzy.

So, we worked on the house for several weeks in December 2007 without heat. That was fun. This is Tommy bundled up and breaking stuff with his hammer. Did I mention we worked without heat? Your hands don't really work as well in the cold.

This picture was taken on Christmas Eve 2007. We had a Christmas miracle that day...after fiddling with the electrical, Tommy got the electric garage door to work! It was truly spectacular.

Surprise Under the Stairs

This summer, Tom and I were working on running electrical to the scary storage room under our back porch stairs. An unpleasant smell was emanating from the area, but I had assumed it was just musty, old basement smell. I was wrong! We took a light to the unlit area under the stairs and found this...

Well my friends, I am very sorry to report that it was a dead feline friend which someone had tried (unsuccessfully) to bury with pea gravel. (Seriously?) As owners of 2 very sweet + 1 not so sweet kitties, this was a very gross discovery. We donned masks, shovels and large contractor trash bags and cleaned up the pile as quickly as humanly possible.