Creating Our Dream Cottage Kitchen ✨ DIY Stone Wall | DIY Exposed Rafters

By the title of this video, you guys know what today's video is going to be about. And this was actually a video I've been very nervous to post because we had a great kitchen. I know so many of you loved our kitchen. 90% of it looks the same, so don't worry. But we did do quite a lot of changes and that's what this video today is going to be about. I feel like I need to share a little bit of a backstory to my personal favorite design for this to kind of make sense. So six years ago, we bought our home. When we were remodeling it, I wanted to make design choices that kind of everybody would like because I really didn't think we would be here very long. Before that, we had moved every single year for five years straight. So I didn't think we'd be here very long. I thought, well, let's just make it beautiful, but something that like everybody would love. So that was kind of my mindset when it came to designing the kitchen specifically. Obviously things go in and out of style, but I will tell you right now, what I've always loved and what like my dream home has always been has been like an old English cottage. If I could go anywhere in the world and like spend the weekend in an old English cottage, that literally would be my dream. So then I was thinking, if that's truly like my actual favorite design, like the dreamiest thing I could think of is English cottage vibes, then why do I keep making design choices that are totally not that? I think a lot of it was because I thought if we wanted to have something like that, the homes I'm referring to are like two, 300 years old. Those are my very favorite. I kind of assumed I'd have to buy a really old home that was like two or 300 years old in order to get that look. But we decided we're going to try to do it ourselves. Like try to make our home look like it's old. It's kind of the opposite of what I think most people are trying to do. They want to make their house look new. We're doing the opposite. We want people when they walk in to think our home has been here for two to 300 years old. That's kind of the goal that we're going for. Some of my favorite things when it comes to kitchens, and I've noticed this across the board. Anytime I've pinned something from an old English cottage, they rarely if ever have upper cabinets. And so I'm like, that's what I'm not loving in our kitchen. They were beautiful. I'm going to tell you right now, we don't have them anymore. Well, two. We got rid of just the two cabinets right here. We're going to walk through the whole process of what we did, but removing the upper cabinets was something I really wanted to do. After doing that, another thing I really wanted back in our kitchen was our window. So when we first moved in, we actually closed up this window and it was like a temporary thing. We just put like sheetrock up over it. And then we tiled over the front of that. So it was a pretty easy process to re-expose the window. This is the same window that was here before. We didn't get a new window. We just had the window panes on this window. And then Thomas just kind of patched it up, any of the damage. And then we went ahead and did our faux stone wall. So I will be walking you guys through that entire process. I didn't want to do any demo. I know so many of you loved our cabinets before. So I didn't want to do that to you guys. I decided we're just going to remove them. And we wanted to just show our viewers us adding beauty to the wall, rather than tearing things out. First obstacle I would say we ran into is my dream kitchen. I will actually show you some pictures right here. The company's called Deval. I might be saying that wrong, but this kitchen is like the kitchen of my dreams. I love the stone. It's like stone that's been really over-grouted. It looks really old. I actually asked them on Instagram, I'm like, how did you do that wall? They were like, oh, it was already here. I'm like, of course. And then they're like, we just painted over the top of it. I didn't realize these people have a show on the Magnolia Network. So they have a show called For the Love of Kitchens. I didn't even know that. But basically all of their kitchens are to die for. Makes sense why they have their own TV show. But those old English cottage kitchens, you guys, I'm just literally obsessed. Besides that, this wall was something we wanted to do. We didn't know how we were going to do that. We filmed Thomas doing it, so we will walk you through that in a minute. But the other thing we wanted to do was look like we had exposed rafters. And we couldn't do that in this room. The last room we did was our family room, and we actually were able to do that. We ripped back the ceiling. There were beams, there was shiplap. It was a beautiful discovery. We had no idea that it was under our sheet rock. So we wanted to kind of carry that throughout the rest of the house. And we did it through the kitchen, the breakfast nook, and the dining room. So the first step we're going to show you today is Thomas doing the stones, the mortar, how he did all of that to get this look in our kitchen. And then we will move on to the ceiling. So here's Thomas patching up the window. And then he also installed the beam, which I did not get this on camera. But this was a beam that we found at Rustic Lumber in Kaysville, Utah. They had a ton of different old beams. All of the pieces of wood that we got from there were really old. So we just cut one to fit the top of this window. As far as the stone goes, we picked this at Floor and Decor. We grabbed just two boxes thinking that would probably be enough, but we ended up needing to go back and get two more. So we did two boxes on the right side and then two boxes on the left side. There was no rhyme or reason to how he puzzled this together. We just wanted there to be random stones on the wall. And then he was going to go in with mortar and fill it all in. This is where Thomas spent probably a good week or so, just adding layers and layers. Since we were going for that really overcrowded look, it did take a lot of mortar. I wanna talk about the mortar we used because we first got some that was pre-mixed. The color was white and it ended up being super dark gray, but we were okay with that because we planned on just painting over it anyway, but it was so expensive. I think it was close to $50 for like a small amount. And then with how much he needed, he was like, I need to get the powder kind that I mix myself. So he went and got the same exact kind, the same brand in the color white, but it was one that he had to mix himself and it dried perfectly white. So we actually decided we didn't need to go ahead and paint it because we love how it looks like this, but he did end up using three bags of mortar on top of the pre-mixed bucket that he did. So there was a lot of mortar needed. He did say if you puzzled the stones closer together that he wouldn't have needed as much because there was a lot of filling in between, but regardless, we love how this looks. It looks so similar to our inspiration picture. So I am just so happy with how this turned out. He did work in small sections. I don't know if you can tell by this, but work in small sections. And then he would use a damp sponge to go ahead and just flatten everything out and smooth everything out just to give it that look that we were going for. I love the look of old copper pots hanging on a rod in a kitchen. So I decided since this was going to be really just for looks, this was not something that was functional, I was going to just spray paint my own copper pots because they're quite expensive. And if I wanted them to look old, I didn't want to get new ones. So I decided to just go to my thrift store and I spray painted the bottoms of these pots. So I will have the color that I use listed below in the description box. So for the ceiling, we wanted it to look like we had exposed rafters. We wanted the natural looking shiplap that's underneath ceilings. And I'm going to show you guys a few examples of inspiration that I found on Instagram. Again, anytime I'd see these kitchens or these houses, I'm like, oh my gosh, I would die. I would die to have my ceiling look like this. And since we've done it, that's how I feel every day walking out here. I'm like, oh my gosh, it just feels so cozy and I'm obsessed with it. We were not able to find tutorials on this anywhere. They don't exist because again, it's people exposing what's already there. It's hard to just make something look like it's old. So we're really excited to be hopefully one of the first people showing you guys how to do this. So the first thing Thomas did was find a bunch of beams and we actually did this in like a process. Like we didn't buy everything at once. We bought the beams little by little. I forget the name of where we went, but I will have it listed right here. But that's where we got all of our beams. And then as far as the shiplap goes, we did the exact same thing we do on all of our walls where we get our plywood. It's like the cheapest plywood you could get. And Thomas ripped them into four inch strips. So I'm gonna stop talking and show you guys how Thomas did this. So here was our ceiling before. We did have three faux beams that we ran in our kitchen. Here is also a view of our old cabinets. I still love them. I still think they were beautiful, but I love what we have now. I don't really know how to explain what Thomas is doing here, but if you are looking to do this yourself, you can kind of get an idea by how he started. So all of these beams ran eight feet. We just kind of worked in sections of eight feet. So we did eight feet going all the way across from the edge of the kitchen all the way to our pantry doors. But then we kind of sectioned it off with our breakfast nook because the ceiling is just so large right here that we did kind of have to work in sections, which in cottages, they kind of do that anyway. They do have that one supportive beam that runs down the center. And then everything runs off of that. Something else I decided to do was I had him cut each of the beams in half. And then we ran those over the top of the stove area because I wanted that section to look a little bit different. We liked the brayer smoke color, but we noticed it was going on way too dark and it wouldn't have looked very good. And since these boards are pretty red, we do a coat of this Tinsmith gray first. And then we go over the top with the brayer smoke and it really makes it look old and a lot lighter than just the brayer smoke. So I spread it as much as I possibly can. And the best way to do that is with a rag. If you use a paintbrush, it's going to go on one layer and you're not going to be able to control how much is absorbed. Whereas this, I can just spread it and keep like pushing hard and it moves it around quite a bit. See like one drip, one dab covers almost the whole board because it already has one coat. So it's not absorbing very much into the wood. Thomas said, if he could go back, he would have ran all of the shiplap before he did the beams because that just made way more cuts. So in some areas he removed the beams, did an entire sheet of the shiplap and then put the beams back over the top. So that's what he's doing right here. But in some areas he couldn't do that. So he just had to make a lot more cuts. One helpful tip though, if you are going to tackle this, when you pick your beam, you do want to have that up on your ceiling, at least just one of them, so that you can test some shiplap to know exactly what color you will need because all beams are a little bit different. And so you're going to want to make your shiplap the same color or as close to the same color as your beam. What we did is we tested a whole bunch of boards and this technique is what worked the very best to make it match the best. But if we compared them outside, they look totally different. If we compared them inside on the ground, they look totally different. So there is something about having them up on the ceiling and testing it up on the ceiling of where they're going to be to get the right color. Before I ended this video, I did want to mention that we are eventually going to be running the same wood floor that we did in our family room throughout the kitchen. So that will be the next thing that we tackle. We just didn't want to wait to do that to get this video out. So that will be the next step is to continue the floors throughout the kitchen. And then I also wanted to mention that we're turning our laundry room into a shared pantry. So it will be both a pantry and a laundry room. And that's actually where our fridge will be. So we are just moving that into there. That might sound weird to have the fridge inside the pantry, but we actually love that it's no longer the focal point in the kitchen. So we were happy to get that moved. And then this cabinet that we have here in the same place that we had our fridge, I will actually be having a DIY video go up tomorrow or the next day on how I made over this cabinet. So that's everything for this video. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you haven't yet hit that red subscribe button, make sure you do that. And we'll see you guys in the next video.