Thinking back, I have no idea how we did as much as we did in three weeks. Especially in London, where building materials go by different names and where we once spent eight hours driving around the city to make two pickups. Two.

But we did it! This two bedroom flat had decent bones and nice looking floors when we arrived, but that was about all. Lots of chunky black frames hung on the walls, and furniture pieces in bright greens, bright pinks, and rich purples filled most of the rooms. Unfortunately, we don’t have perfect before and after pairs. But we don’t have many photos at all, so you’ll get the idea!

Here are two opposite walls in the living room:

And the two main sections of the kitchen:

Clearly everything had to go! Tara flitted all over London, Hastings, Brighton, and Rye looking for cool vintage furniture, while I got to work demoing the mantle, kitchen shelves, and kitchen island (not pictured, but imagine a big chunky imposition); opening up a doorway; plastering like crazy; and then building some pieces: leaves for the existing kitchen table which I cut narrower, a console table for the living room, and a new open kitchen island made from amazing old cheese boards and half the salvaged marble from the old island, with the other half topping the console table.

Whew, that paragraph was as rambling and chaotic as this three-week job felt. Your reward for getting through it: after photos!

First, the same two opposite sides of the living room. Everything you see we either found at an antique shop or built! You can catch a glimpse of the console table in the second photo.

And now the kitchen, with the pink plaster we did and will love forever and ever:

Now one with the new faucet, which didn’t arrive until after we’d flown back home:

A detail of the split-top of the new island we built, half marble and half cheese board:

I just finished posting 17 never-before-seen before-and-after photos to the Before + After section of our website! Half of them will blow your mind–we’re talking McMansion kitchens and bright orange, purple, and pink paint in the before photos–and the other half aren’t too bad either. I can’t even tell you how much trouble I had limiting myself to two examples for this post!

Click on over to see all the new Before + Afters from Justine Hand’s kitchen, our big Magic Egg project from last year, and Beth Kirby’s kitchen (aka Local Milk‘s kitchen, or the kitchen of just about everyone’s dreams). You can see all the after photos from those project in the Design section of our website.

As usual, it’s been way too long since our last blog post. We’re really going to work to change that in the new year. Seriously! We mean it this time! There’s just something about designing and executing everything ourselves that doesn’t leave much time or energy for photographing and documenting our work as much as we should. Especially when we have to pull a couple 12+ hour days in a row to meet an end-of-job deadline.  But believe me when I say we’re working on it! We even have an Etsy shop update and a website update in the works.

Until then, here are some photos from a little job we’ve never posted on our own site (though you may have seen it on Remodelista a few months ago): Justine Hand’s kitchen. What a whirlwind! We had less than five days and a $3,000 materials budget to work with, so it might have been some of our fastest work to date. But it turned out beautifully.

Big thanks to Justine for letting us use her beautiful photos!

More photos (including a before pic) after the jump!

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