I wanted to thank Design*Sponge and Apartment Therapy for featuring my latest project on both of their blogs this week! It was great hearing everyone's feedback and ideas on the work that we've done in the past few months. I've loved learning by doing and I'm so proud that there's so many changes in our home that we did with our own hands. Links below!

Before & After: Christina's Kitchen
on Design*Sponge.

The "Decor Refresh That's So Powerful It Looks Like a Renovation" Kitchen Makeover
on Apartment Therapy.

The "Pop of Pink to Stylishly Simple" Breakfast Nook Makeover
on Apartment Therapy.

DIY PROJECT: Kitchen Rehab with Dining Nook

It's been 1 year and 2 months since we moved into our home, and I'm excited to say that our kitchen and living room are finally done! It's been a lot of work, a lot of it cosmetic, most of it DIY, and a LOT of white paint.

I can't believe how different it looks from when we first moved in. Luckily, I have the listing photos of how the house looked when we bought it!

The main issue with our house was that it was UGLY. I mean it looked like they bought all the sale paint at Lowe's and just went to town on every room. There was poor use of space and nothing was well-maintained. Luckily for us, the bones of our house are great - it just needed a lot of elbow grease. I feel like I always able to visualize how I wanted it to look, which was really helpful motivation throughout the year.

The list of projects is long, but some of the main projects were: repainting the walls, ceilings, trim, and cabinets; painting the cabinet hardware, replacing the kitchen backsplash (a project I completed after teaching myself how to tile on my mantle and vestibule); removing the blinds and frosting the window glass to let in all of the natural light that was being blocked out; floating whitewashed maple boards throughout the kitchen and mudroom; building a breakfast nook; building an industrial shelving unit; and a ridiculous amount of cleaning, like sanding down the butcher block countertops and replacing the oven's insulation.

We're planning on taking a break from house projects for a few months to enjoy our hard work and finally let our friends inside, and next year we're hoping to install a deck in the backyard, build a workshop in the basement, and rewire the house. But for now I'll just enjoy making breakfast.

DIY PROJECT: Industrial Open Shelving

The last project in our kitchen rehab was one that I'd planned from the start - a large industrial shelving unit for open display of dishes, dried goods, and everything else that needed a home.

I'd found tons of inspiration for the project and was just waiting until the rest of the kitchen to come together. I had plenty of designs already made up, and had calculated costs every which way based on everything from pipe diameter to connector hardware, and drafted plans by hand and in Sketchup. Our main requirement was that we wanted the shelf to be free-standing - we didn't want to drill anything into our walls, floors, or ceilings.

When we finally found the wood for our shelves, the boards were so straight and beautiful that we didn't want to drill into them. So I designed our shelves again, so that they would lay across the pipes instead of having the pipes drilled through them, and still be free-standing - based on a Crate and Barrel shelf I found that was basically two separate towers of pipes. It took two weekends of work, but we built this 8'x7' shelf for under $450.

image via joe kemp

We found our boards at one of my favorite hidden gems in Philadelphia - Provenance Architecturals. The 2 inch thick, 10'x1' boards were reclaimed from dredged pine, and were only $15 a board - such a deal that we bought twice as much as we needed. The guys at Provenance have always been unbelievably helpful when I come in with some crazy project on a scrap of notebook paper - to the point where they were helping us look at every single board to find the best of the best to take home.

After bringing them home and cutting them down to 8', we sanded the tops and bottoms and oiled them with mineral oil. The next step was heading to Home Depot with a long list of the pipes that we'd need, and a pipe wrench.

I'd put a lot of work into figuring out how to get all of the pipes we'd need with the least amount of cuts and waste of materials, so it was easy for me to just leave my diagram and tell the guys at Home Depot to take their time, and just call me when they were done. I'd definitely suggest doing that when asking for a lot of custom work as opposed to waiting around and looking over their shoulder the whole time. Thanks South Philly Home Depot!

After we got home I spent the whole night degreasing the pipes and removing any printed letters/numbers with acetone before organizing them by size. All in all, the pipes and hardware cost approximately $350. Luckily for us, our families gift us Home Depot and Lowes gift cards for almost every holiday for whatever our next project will be.

One word of caution against the design method we chose - because all of the pipes are interconnected, there will be at least one pipe in each "square" section that needed to be screwed into one end, then slightly unscrewed in order to screw in to the opposite side simultaneously. It is much easier to have pipes screw into the wall, floor, or ceiling than it is to have them all screw into each other. However, we were prepared for it, and spent A LOT of time counting threads to make sure that all of the pipes were even and secured.

However, I am glad we chose the design method we did because it will make moving easy, and if we ever want to use the boards for anything else we didn't have to drill holes into them, and we didn't have to drill holes into the plaster walls or into our new floors.