before and after: painted kitchen

You may remember the hunter green kitchen I inherited from the previous tenant:

I didn't hate this color, but I didn't particularly like it, either.  I started painting it about two weeks ago, thinking that I would tackle one wall per night, since there would be a lot of cutting in to do.  The first night put three coats on the wall.   I generally start my projects around 8:30 or 9 pm, after my kids are in bed.  That meant three coats put me in bed after midnight, and I discovered that the previous tenant had painted over wallpaper, which looked terrible, and that the three-coated wall still needed a fourth coat.  That kind of put me off the project for a while.

I procrastinated for about two weeks, thinking "ah, crap" every time I walked in the kitchen.  But Greg's birthday party is this weekend, and while my family would not hold a quarter-painted kitchen against me, I just couldn't face looking at it anymore.  Plus I really wanted that cabinet fastened to the wall and the countertop installed so I could get all my pots and pans off the dining room floor.  The only way out is through, right?  (Funny enough, the handyman that has been ignoring my calls for three weeks just called on Tuesday night, the day after we finally did it ourselves.)

And here is the finished project.

Anyone see another project I've been working on?

The kitchen is painted Sherwin Williams Linen White, not because I have any affinity for that color, but because the landlord left a 5 gallon bucket of that paint in the basement, and the rest of the house is painted that color.  I am totally down with free paint.  After 6 years of having Kilim Beige in every house we have lived in, I have come back around to liking white walls.

I painted the back door BM Gossamer Blue.  The plates on the wall are from Vietri, Italy, and used to hang in the bathroom in our old apartment.  I put up a bamboo shade we already owned on the door.

I used a valance that I had originally made for my mother in law's house.  The teal/red/brown colors go with the colors on the first floor perfectly, and it was free.  I have more of that material, so I could make some cafe curtains, and I might recover the bamboo shade on the door with it as well....or I might not.

My only other plans in this kitchen are to switch out the hardware.  I would love to put cup pulls on the drawers, but at $5 a pop and 10 drawers, I won't. I will probably just get the 10 pack of oil-rubbed bronze knobs at Target.

I like the white much better than the green. The kitchen looks brighter and cleaner and bigger, and I love seeing the pop of the blue back door when I walk in the front door. 

my grandmother's paintings, art for the boys room, framing the thermostat

I put up a few pieces of art around the house this weekend.  Although the house has been livable for quite a while now, I'm still getting around to unpacking our art and figuring out where to put it.  Almost all of our art has a story behind it, and I feel as I put the pieces up that it helps turn this rental into "our" home while we are here.  (Even if that means I have a lot of patching to do when we leave.)

First I put up two pieces painted by my grandmother.

The top one is a picture of peaches.  For our wedding favors, the Mister and I made peach jam (nearly setting the house on fire in the process), so my grandmother painted peaches and in the middle there, a little jar of peach jam.  She gave it to us after our wedding, along with a beautiful handwritten note.

I've stored the note in the back of the picture so we don't lose it, and hopefully some day my kids or grandkids will find that note stored there.

The bottom picture was a little piece she painted and I begged her to give it to me.  I'm so happy I have these pieces; they mean a lot to me.

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I also added some art to the boys room.  Originally I painted a mirror orange and put it in there, but when I needed a round mirror for my own bedroom I appropriated that one, leaving a blank spot in the boys' room.

The boys are too short to see the mirror on top of the dressers, so I was looking for a piece of art they could enjoy. I wanted a photograph, but not of their faces.  I had the three of them sit on the lawn and tried to get a picture of their feet lined up, but no one would cooperate.  After a gazillion shots, I finally took this tangle of limbs as the best one.  Peter wears a red allergy bracelet, and he likes that it is so clearly his in the picture.

Sorry for the glare, I tried a million angles but they all are reflected in the glass.

I took the best picture and had it blown up by Poster Brain.  It was cheap--less than $30 with shipping.  I put it in a 28x40 white Ribba frame.  Originally I bought a birch Ribba frame and spraypainted it navy blue, but that didn't work so well. I have spraypainted Ribba frames many times, but I usually get the unfinished wood one, and this size does not come in unfinished wood.  The melamine-like birch frames do NOT take well to spraypaint.  In fact, all the spray paint flaked right off the moment I touched it. Half the paint came off when I tried to put the picture in the frame.  I gave up and bought another white one.

I may retry this photoshoot again someday soon.  After blowing up the picture, all I can see when I look at it is that I should have cut their toenail talons.

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Lastly, we replaced our 1950s thermostat with a new digital one that is much smaller.  This left some ugly bumps and holes in the wall.  I patched and painted but it was still obvious.  I found an ornate frame in the basement the right size, and framed the thermostat.  If you can't hide it, make it pretty.

What's your favorite piece of art in your house, and what's the story behind it?

Gossamer Blue back door

This weekend, on one of my many trips to Home Depot, I picked up some paint chips.  It seems like everyone in blogland is painting their front doors a bright, cheerful color.  Our front door is painted a stolid, dirge-worthy, funereal gray. (Why does everyone love gray so much? It makes me think of a bleak February day.)  The landlord seems to like the door that way, so I will leave it alone.

The back door, however, is a really beat up dark wood stain.  I don't think the landlord will mind if I paint it, and I can always paint it a nice bleak gray to match the front door if he doesn't.

I picked a bunch of happy bright yellows and reds and greens.  I'm leaning towards bright sunshiny yellow.

But painting the back door is kind of low on the list--I did the kitchen this weekend, and the cabinets, and I still need to do the china cabinet.  While I was painting a foam board for the back of the bookshelf (BM's Gossamer Blue), I thought, you know, this can is already open, and the INSIDE of the back door would look pretty with a fresh color...so on a whim I painted the inside of the back door.

The back door is directly in line with the front door, so you see it immediately upon entering the house.  I like that its a bit of pretty color that also ties in with all the other rooms on the first floor. I've used this blue in the bookshelves in the living room, and I will be painting the china cabinet that color eventually.  So its a nice pop of color when you walk in the house.

cue the heavenly music

I have a kitchen cabinet, installed to the wall, in which to put my pots and pans.  Voila.

I still have to paint it, but its functional!

We also installed a shelf under the cabinet on the other side of the kitchen.  I was inspired by this picture; the kitchen cabinets in that kitchen go all the way to the ceiling, as mine do, and I find it difficult to reach anything above the first shelf without a step stool.  The shelving underneath allows me to put the cups and plates I use most within reach.

I would love to run that shelving under the other cabinets as well, but the stove breaks up the space.

We also painted the entire kitchen (four coats!), installed the dining room shelves, built two new bookshelves, installed doors on two other bookshelves...and that doesn't sound like a huge amount, does it, but I assure you it took the entire three day weekend (see again: FOUR coats of paint).

More posts to come on the awesomeness we accomplished this weekend.  

the weekend to-do list

Doesn't everyone do home improvement on holiday weekends?  What? You relax and have a bbq?  We don't do that sort of thing around here. We prefer back-breaking manual labor.

I'd keep procrastinating on these projects forever, but my son's birthday party is next weekend, which means there will be people in my house, and thus I am shamed into finishing all projects I have started and abandoned.

1. Finish painting the kitchen.  Blarg.

2. Paint the electric green china cabinet a soothing blue. I have been procrastinating on this one because I want to put mirrors in the doors, but the interior shelves were built over top of the side panes of glass, so to do the side panes I will have to dismantle the entire inside...and that seems like a lot of work.  Would silverleafing the side panes look dumb if the front panes are mirrors?  I have not yet figured out what to do with this.

3. Finish installing the picture ledges in the dining room.

4. Install the kitchen cabinet.  The handyman we hired has flaked out on us, so we will be doing it ourselves.  Pray that our marriage survives.

5. Bonus project: pick up some bookshelves and Billy bookshelf doors at Ikea.  This is not a high priority project but its the one I want to do the most.  If I get all the other crap done, this is my reward--restyling the bookshelves.

Hope you all have a relaxing weekend! 

The living room desk area

Last you saw my living room, the one side looked like this:

This arrangement felt nice--although the chairs are in front of the bookshelves, it felt reasonably spacious.

However, I really wanted a desk.  I had my own desk area in our old apartment, and I miss that.  There is no room here for an office, and the spaces for even a small desk are limited.

I happened to own an ugly little table from Ikea that was the perfect size for between the windows. Voila, desk area!

Except....it feels cramped, and CLUTTERED.  Oh my heavens, does it feel cluttered. Its not just the vast sea of paper that I drown in on a weekly basis (wait till school starts!), but the setup just doesn't feel right. I lived with it for a couple of weeks, and while I appreciate the functionality of having a desk on the first floor, I really don't like the way it looks and feel. There is just too much furniture in that spot.

I moved the table out, and brought the secretary (previously on the other side of the room) over.

The scale works better, and it doesn't look as cramped.  I might wish that the secretary were not so close in color to the blue upholstered chair right next to it, but I can always paint the secretary.  That's way at the bottom of my list, though, right behind finish painting the kitchen and start painting the dining room china cabinet. Lots o' things waiting to be painted around here.

We'll see how this works out, the original bamboo table may make a comeback.  There's also a changing table out in the garage that would be a nice height and would give persons sitting in those chairs a place to rest their drinks. 

We survived, how are you?

Thankfully, we survived Irene with minimal damage.  Hopefully you all did too.

We decided to decamp to my mother in law's house.  We prepared our house as well as we could, packed all the outdoor stuff in the garage, and moved everything in the basement up on shelving and bricks.  I can't imagine having to actually evacuate--it took us nearly five hours to pack stuff for a three day stay at my mother in law's and prep the house.

Our hurricane experience was pretty plush, we had power, water and AC the whole time.  My mother in law got a little bit of water in the basement, but we had expected a lot more and so had moved everything up, so there wasn't any damage.

She's also had problems before with the bay window, so we prepared by moving the living room furniture away from the window.

That space behind the piano is a nice place to play cards.

Princess loves to play the "red pi-nano".

We spent a lot of time building a Lego lighthouse.

Its a masterpiece (that's about 4 hours worth of building).

We ate lots of delicious dessert (chocolate chip cookie layer, then oreos, then a layer of brownies):

Princess got Grandma to tell her naptime stories.

I went to bed last night at 10, but woke up every twenty minutes the entire night to get up and peer out the window to make sure that a tree wasn't going to fall on the house.  I find it difficult to sleep when I am afraid that I and my family will be crushed by falling trees.  At 4 am I gave up any pretense of sleep and got up and watched the weather channel.  Jim Cantore seemed disappointed that NYC was not having more severe flooding.


I was fully expecting to lose power, water, and have a foot of water in our basement, but our house was just fine.  Towns around us had much more damage; we were pretty lucky.  

So! We are happy to have escaped unscathed.  If you were in the storm path, how did you fare?