Illumination

This morning we installed a new light fixture in the kitchen! *LOVE!* What a difference the detail of a light makes.

Here is the light we used to have. It was a ceiling fan, but back when we had to repair the ceiling because of a leak from the upstairs bathroom we removed the blades and never put them back up since we knew we wanted a different fixture. Pretty much was an eyesore in my pretty kitchen and a blinding one at that!

BEFORE:

Here is my new pretty light! Oh how I love finishing touches :).

AFTER!

(lights off)




(lights on!)

Kitchen Updates

I am getting excited that spring is here because that means we can pick up where we left off with our house projects! We are intending to complete the pantry/entryway project in the next couple months, and we also have a lot of "finishing" work to do in the kitchen.

I had been keeping an eye on bench/wall shelf sets for a couple years now and finally found a deal I couldn't pass up. I wish I had a before picture to show (actually, maybe I don't...) of how cluttered and messy this area always looked. We had two sets of peg hooks on the wall for coats which was always overloaded and a rug on the floor for shoes, which always ended up all over the kitchen floor, plus a cardboard box full of hats and gloves, etc. Not pretty at all. Now we have a few hooks for stuff, plus storage for shoes and hats and gloves where they are out of sight! No more tripping over shoes, and it neatens up the entry into the kitchen so nicely! Now I just have to figure out what I want to hang on the wall there. I am also planning on replacing the canvas bins with baskets and I am going to make a seat cover for the bench (the cushion is the same color as the bins - I just stuck a table cloth on it to get an idea.)

I also hung out pans on the wall next to the stove, which is very handy!

And painted our fridge black to match the other appliances! It was very easy. We picked up 2 cans of black appliance epoxy from Home Depot and voila! :) One trick that worked well for me was to paint the door handles well ahead of time. Then while the fridge is no longer sticky, but still needs to set for a bit, you can reattach the handles and use the fridge without ruining your nice finished coat.

My new Keurig is at home :).

See my pantry door? I made a change to that too!

I bought some Chalkboard paint and turned the panel into a memo board!

We love it, and the kids are having so much fun with it I am planning on painting the bottom panel too so they can have their own space and my lists stop getting erased for all their fun little pictures :).

Try This At Home: Stenciled Lettering

I love the look of vinyl lettering, but I'm not a fan of the price tag. I had seen several different ideas around the Internet about painting letters by making your own stencils, so I figured I'd give it a try. The first step is to decide what font to use and print out your letters/numbers on card stock. Most methods I had come across said to cut out the letters with an exacto-knife, so I tried that with the first 3 letters. I thought it took way too long, and was too difficult, so I started just cutting out the black letters with scissors. Since you are going to be tracing it onto your surface anyways, I figured it didn't matter which way you did it, and the scissor method was a lot quicker and more user friendly :).

Then hold or tape your letters to the surface and trace the outline with a pencil. This is great because it allows you to erase or adjust things before you actually start painting. Once the letters are penciled on where you want them, use a fine brush to fill them in with paint. You need a pretty fine brush to do most fonts, especially if they are decorative or cursive. I used a small brush for the main letters, and a tiny makeup brush to do the detailed part.

I am pretty happy with the results and have a few more projects in mind around the house. Now we just need to build the inside of the pantry! :)

Finishing Touches

Two tips for redecorating:
1. Define your space.
2. Use what you already have and make it better.

One part of remodeling or redecorating, along with decluttering, is identifying the purpose for a space. It has taken us these 3 years we've lived in this house to figure out exactly what we use each room for (and we're still figuring it out in some areas!). As we work on each room, we are trying to streamline that a bit.

Our kitchen, for example, gets used for a lot more than cooking and eating. We tend to lug our laptop in there quite frequently to either listen to music, or to look up recipes, or pay bills so we can spread out on the table. Rather than have it on the counter where food could spill, or on the table with the cord draped across the room (not wise with two small children running around), we decided it would be wise to incorporate a work area devoted to that and that alone. I had a console table in there that I originally plopped the coffee pot and a few other things on, but really wasn't necessary for that use, so we decided to "convert" it. Along with the "desk" space we created, I also wanted to make it more useful as the organizational "hub" of the house. So we moved the family calendar above it and a letter box I picked up from TJ Maxx for letters to mail, bills, etc to keep the desk clear.

But that's a pretty big wall for just the calendar so I have been trying to think of what else I could hang that would be functional as well as decorative. I really hated to pay much at all for shelving . . . so I figured I should look through what I already have and see what I could come up with. I found these two items - a cabinet with a chalkboard on the front that the previous owners had left. We had taken it down when we repainted the kitchen and never had a spot to put it back up. And a shelf someone had given me years ago that wasn't really the right style anymore.

The chalkboard cabinet I just painted to match the kitchen cabinets with leftover paint...

I took the shelf and removed the doors, painted it to match, and flipped it upside down! I added a little basket to hold receipts and a bowl for keys too!

I hung them on either side of the calendar and thought it was still missing something, so I moved my coffee clock above it and it was the finishing touch!

Since I moved the clock, the space above the cupboards looked too bare, so I picked up a decorative wall hanging for half off at Hobby Lobby!

Functionality + Beauty + Low Cost = Perfection!

De-Clutter and Organize!

Now that I've finally stopped feeling sick every day, and am starting to get an appetite and some energy back, one of my main goals before this baby comes is to work on cleaning out and seriously organizing around here. A lot of that just involves making sure everything has a place and eliminating clutter. I like to be organized, but that doesn't mean it necessarily happens.

We completed one step towards that goal last week by enclosing the fridge with an extension of the upper cabinets and adding a bulletin board and magnetic strips to hold the kids' artwork. I should have taken a photo of the actual "before" of the side of my fridge...it was pretty cluttered with photos and drawings and such and no matter how often I'd clear it, it would end up back that way. Now, it may still hold a lot of "stuff" but at least it looks a bit neater.

Before: After:

We also have been doing some major clean up in our yard. Because we are on a huge corner lot, we have these gigantic privacy hedges that line the street side and part of the back of our yard. They are pretty massive not only height-wise, but girth-wise and end up needing trimming 3-4 times a season, which can be a 2-3 day job. Last week, we decided that we finally needed to take the time to hack them back significantly. They had reached about 10 ft in height and we cut them down to about 6 ft. We spent two days, and still have the third section left to do, but it already looks so much better, and improved our view of the water from our house as well. Below you can see the job half done, which shows how much we took off.

And speaking of our yard, check out part of our garden! We have really been enjoying all of the fresh veggies we've been getting. So fun to go out in the evening to pick a fresh salad before dinner!

I'll have living room/fireplace makeover photos to show very soon! Just putting the finishing touches on things and it will be ready for posting! :)

The Mystery Leak

Water stains. Unwelcome visitors in any home. Especially ours.

A few months ago we noticed a couple small ones had appeared on our kitchen ceiling. This was during those months when Brad was barely home, and I know as much about plumbing as I do about ice fishing . . . enough to know I don't like it. So we decided to let it go and keep an eye on it. To my dismay, the water stains began to multiply in number and spread out more across the ceiling. Since the holidays were upon us, we again decided to keep an eye on it. We did take a look into the pipe closet behind the shower when we were in the middle of remodeling the kitchen, but were unable to find what we dubbed "the mystery leak." We attributed it to the kids wet bath toys being put away in the cupboard and dripping down, but that just didn't seem like it would create that big of a stain, if any. However, upon returning from our recent trip we were even more dismayed to find the many small water stains had begun to merge into a larger one and there were even some small, yet noticeable, cracks in the ceiling.

Yesterday we decided we had kept an eye on it long enough and cut out a piece of the ceiling to try and get to the bottom of the mystery leak.

After several hours of searching, we finally found it coming from where the pipe goes through the wall into the shower. We were fortunately able to create a temporary fix by redirecting the leak back into the tub (it only leaks when the shower is on) which saved us $150 for now. We plan to do the full repair when we gut and remodel the whole bathroom hopefully within the next year.

So we didn't get to grout the tile or finish the trim in the kitchen as planned. But in lieu of the water stains I have this really cool trapdoor-looking thing on my ceiling.

Hopefully the leak problem is resolved for awhile and it will look like a normal ceiling again . . . soon.

P.S. To my loyal friends who participated in Friday Funny Pages yesterday without me...you guys are the best and my sincerest apologies for not posting this week. This whole leak business kept me pretty occupied but I will be back on track next week!

P.P.S. Special thanks to my mother-in-law for the use of their digital camera so we can continue to take massive amounts of photos of our most favorite people as much as we want! :)

The Finished Floor

It's a beautiful thing.

I'm Still Here

We decided to go ahead and do the floor in the kitchen yesterday. We tore up the old linoleum to reveal some even "lovelier" tile underneath that we couldn't remove without tearing out the whole floor. So we put the new floor right over the original. We worked for 8-9 hours and got down to the last row and ran out of flooring. So it is, as of yet, unfinished and hopefully we can get the rest installed tonight when Brad gets home. The most exciting part of the job was when we realized (after acknowledging the fact before starting) that the new floor is thicker than the old and we would need to trim the bottoms of the two doors. Little did we know the exterior door had probably never been removed since installation and was going to take us a good hour to remove. There goes my nice paint job on the door. Fun :). Despite the setbacks I have a kitchen floor that I totally love! Here are a few pictures from yesterday and I promise to post a photo when it is all finished.

Yucky old floor and even yuckier older floor underneath...

The remains...
The pretty new floor!

Our "New" Old Kitchen

I love old things. Our house is very old and has a lot of history to it. When we bought our house, we loved the size of the kitchen and it was one of the selling points for us. We saw the potential in it (and the rest of the house) when we moved in 2 1/2 years ago, and it is so much fun to now be able to bring new life into it! It was time for an update, and what a gorgeous change it turned out to be! I love my "new" old kitchen! This is the first really major project we've done other than painting and replacing carpet/flooring and light fixtures in other parts of the house (hopefully more to come in the future!). It isn't completely finished yet (still need to put in the new floor, grout the tile, get curtains, etc. and eventually down the road a new fridge)...

...BUT since I know you are all on the edge of your seats to see what we've been up to, here at last are some photos!

BEFORE:
When we were picking out kitchen "stuff" for our wedding registry 8 years ago, blue was very popular and one of our favorite colors at the time, so our dishes and pots/pans are all blue. Funny that we ended up buying a house with a blue-themed kitchen 5 years later (tile board, counter, walls - we painted them a darker blue).


OUT WITH THE OLD...
The tile board looked like it belonged in a bathroom. That was the first thing to go! And it was glued right to those wood planks - no drywall under it.
Our old nasty sink...you saw the close up in the last post, and no I wasn't kidding about how bad it was! :)
The tile board was even glued on the wall to the right of the stove, which I wanted to change to drywall so only the back wall would be tiled.

Our little helper :)
We originally were going to try to keep the counter to save some money, but it turned out we were going to have to destroy the old one to get all the tile board off and I'm so glad we ended up getting a new one because it matches perfectly!
Installing the backer board for the tiles (you can see I had been busy painting the walls by now)
New counter and sink (see previous post) are in, cupboard frames are painted, and wall is ready to tile...
Putting up the tile...
LOVE this decorative piece over the stove!

Getting closer...
I love how the colors turned out. Not sure how well the pictures show it, but the walls are a gold color and the cabinets are an olive-gray.
Brad touching up some paint for me while I take some pictures...
Close up of the tile...
My old coffee cup clock that inspired my new decor...
AFTER...
And here it is!!!





One of two pieces of artwork I found to decorate with to go with my coffee theme!

Hope you enjoyed sharing in our kitchen makeover! I love making things pretty :)
If anyone has a baker's rack they are looking to sell or get rid of let me know! I am looking for one! :)