The Project (not-so-affectionately) known as "The Nook"

As my first home improvement post, I want to share something that has been haunting my husband and I since the day we walked into our house. I'll preface this by saying that our house was a short sale (a very deceiving name for a 7-month long home-buying process) so it wasn't in the BEST of conditions when we bought it. We were ready for a little bit of work. But with the wedding and the tight budget that comes along with it, we were pressed for funds.

The pictures we saw from our realtor were from the previous owners (not the people we bought the house from in the short sale). The décor wasn't TERRIBLE, just not my taste. Here's what the kitchen SHOULD have looked like (sorry for the awful picture quality).

Walking in the front door, pantry on the left, kitchen to the right (can you see the grape stencils?):

View of the kitchen & island:

And the attached dining room:

Now, see how there is a closet in the picture of the dining room? Apparently, between when this picture was taken and when we bought the house, the interim owners decided they wanted that room to be a den (doesn't make sense to me either). They ripped out the closet doors and the framing in an effort to make that space a little bigger. Apparently, when they got that far, they just gave up.

I don't have a great picture of the atrocity it was when we bought it. Just imagine the sheetrock all ripped out, exposed pipes and wiring, and a stunning plywood floor. It's been an eyesore for the whole 2 years we've lived here. We did paint the rest of the kitchen a more eye-friendly shade of green (I like to call the previous shade "baby poop").  Finally, we got fed up and we made a relatively uninformed trip to the local Home Depot (we subsequently made about 20 more trips for the RIGHT tools for this job).  We had clearly never attempted any projects more involved than hanging picture frames.  Here's the hole after some framing work:

And my wonderful husband's sheet rocking job:

Honestly, the mudding/sanding/mudding/sanding/mudding/sanding was the worst part of the whole thing!

All primed and ready to go!

And the (mostly) finished product!

We still have to figure out what in the world to do with the floor (there's not even a subfloor down now, and it's unlikely we can find the same floor tile from the 1990's) and install the baseboard.  I'm not sure about adding molding around the front edges too - what do you think?

Now I can do the fun part - decorating! I bought that buffet at Ikea, but it's looking a little bare. My vision includes a shelf above it... I'll show you the rest of the kitchen/house as I get it looking a little better!