We are now about a month into our project, and starting to see some definite progress inside.  Arlen has been working every day on covering up the yellowness that was this house.  He gave his shoulder quite a workout scrubbing the ceilings and the walls and has applied good quality primer over all of it.  Goodbye, nicotine gold!

Kitchen ‘before.’ I honestly don’t know what is worse – the wallpaper or the carpet (yes, the kitchen floor was carpeted)!

Here is the kitchen ‘midstream’ from roughly the same angle. So much better already!

In keeping with the Art Moderne movement, we are opting for all white interior walls, which is really brightening the space.  Another way we added light, thanks to a suggestion from our friend, Kathy, was to cut a roughly 4 ft. x 4 ft. ‘window’ in the wall between the kitchen and dining room.  Easier said that done with 6” thick solid poured concrete walls!  The wet saw made quite a mess of concrete slime throughout but the results are startling!  The once dark cave of a kitchen is now flooded with natural light from the new skylight (I couldn’t resist putting in a skylight when we put a new roof on) and the light pours through the opening into the dining room.  Jerry, our drywall guy, has lots of mudding to do to square off the edges of the cut concrete, but it is definitely worth it.

Front door before

Here is the newly installed door from the inside. As an added benefit, the door ‘lite’ floods the previously dark and cavelike foyer with light!

New door – still needs to be painted, but kinda sexy, eh? The storm door is getting launched tomorrow.

The other big change this week is the front door.  I have long been fascinated with the ads from Crestview Doors in Atomic Ranch Magazine.  Easy, do-it-yourself modern window kits to make MCM doors, they say.  The horrible multi-panel door on this house was certainly not worth saving (the wood was so thin there was a split down the middle that you could see daylight through) and the style not at all right for the house.  I would love to know what was originally there, because this door certainly was not it.  Opportunity!  We purchased the ‘Nokona’ kit with the reeded glass from Crestview and set out to find a flush wood door.  Little did we know, they stock flush exterior wood doors at Home Depot!  Our opening is an oddball size, but Jerry was able to cut the new door to fit and install the Crestview window in just a couple of hours.  It still needs to be primed and painted, but it looks awesome.  I can’t wait to get the front of the house painted and the new light and address #s up.  Stay tuned for more progress……