New door?

So this post is a lot like my sink post, except that this one has a less "happy ending."

This is our carport door. It goes into our kitchen. Nothing fancy. Pretty plain Jane.

This is our front door, it leads directly into our living room.  No entryway or anything.  It has a screen door in front of it that is perfectly darling. 

I am not a huge fan of either of these doors.  They aren't especially "cute" and I don't see them as especially sturdy, although they are functionally safe.  They just stick a little and are "rough around the edges." 

So the same warehouse sale that had sinks also had doors.  So of course I wanted to find out about those. So we looked at several. 

Here is my dad along with a standard sturdy door.  I think it was designed to be hung the wrong way and had a crack in it (thus it was on sale) but dad wasn't too keen on it so we passed. 

Both of these doors are beautiful and amazing! They came with door frames which we didn't need and were slightly off in the size department and the price department.  They were upwards of $400 and $600.  Too much for  a non-essential.  We had plenty of other things that we actually had  to buy. 

Even though the day was a bust as far as the finding and purchasing of a door and/or sink goes, it was a fun outing and I saw a bunch of cool old stuff.  There were old church pew end-caps and a huge octagonal window (Daniel hates octagon windows, "So very 80's.") 

However, any day now (read that as: in a month or two when I have the time/energy) I plan on painting both of the doors.  I am thinking either a misty blue or a happy sunny yellow.  I can't decide.

(following pics from my pinterest)  

What do you think? 

I also think that unless any of you fabulous people reading have a door solution I am going to go with something like this diy adorable door update.  This is a pretty color too! 

While I'm at it maybe we could use scraps or pallets to create fun shutters? Minus the window box. (We are currently plant killers, but we are working on that.) 

Well? I would love your feedback.  This is one of those projects I have had lurking in the corners of my brain but haven't gotten out and done yet. Help me make a choice!! 

If you're new here feel free to read this or this to get caught up!

Plus any of the others! 

Until next time,

Sarah

The Long Journey to Counter Tops

Counter tops.  What to I have to say about counter tops?  You don't usually think too much about them. Well Kitchens need them. Ours NEEDED replacing. I think there are LOTS of ugly options. Pretty options are mucho mooolah. ($$$$$$)  

That's the short version. 

[If you don't like reading, scroll to the bottom to see the final picture]

(I made these large so you can see better.  The lighting is not good, sorry)

Please excuse the mess, it's a construction site after all. :)

The deal is: Our house is 50 years old.  The kitchen is 50 years old.  The original oven and range were barely working. They were that awesome (ly-hideous) extra special shade of burnt orange/brown. Oh yay.  So obviously, those had to go.  I wanted to keep them and paint them for nostalgia. Daniel wanted to use them as planters.  So we tried to sell them on Craigslist.   No takers. None. Zip. Nota. A whole lot of Nothing. So.....we "sold" them to a recycling place for about $20.  Ok, well now they are out of our carport. Hip, hip, HOOORAY.  The hubs is much less annoyed now. I feel like I have betrayed them, but it wasn't working out. You have to know when the relationship is over. Ya know?  

Yeah, so back to counter tops. Ours were a lovely beige laminate, not the cool kind with metal trim. Just plain pinky-beige.  They had to go. Oh, I said that already? Sorry. 

So we did "research."  I used pinterest.  I found this stuff. 

It had some pretty terrible reviews. I believe bad reviews are a direct consequence of people using the product incorrectly (usually) but I wasn't going to do a bunch of irreversible stuff to our counter tops to have it not work. NO, not going to happen. The hubs is NOT on board. He hated the idea. 

So, I got another idea (from pinterest, of course) 

I said to my self, "Self, this is a great idea! It will look so industrial cool and vintage-y at the same time."  This was my plan. Now to convince the hubby.  Well I did, kind of, but everyone else we mentioned it to said "poo poo."   I read lots of reviews on this too. Some said it worked amazingly.  Some said it cracked after a little while.  I finally found a lady (the Pioneer Woman, I believe) who put several different counter tops in her home.  Concrete being one of them. She said that it was nice, but that she couldn't cook easily on it. Now, I am no Pioneer Woman, but I did want a low maintenance counter top I  could easily cook on and it was clearly not going to be concrete. :-( 

So the hunt continues. 

Copper? 

Looks nice. Really expensive and stains easily.  (The hubby hates stains)

Stainless Steel would also have shown lots of scratches and fingerprints etc. I did not want to have to buff my counter tops every day. No.

I loved the look of the recycled glass (but, $$$$) Not for us. 

So we turned to the ever popular granite (after quickly ruling out marble $$$$)

We looked online,  at Home Depot, at a place near in Kennesaw, at a place way up in Alpharetta:

Expensive, and not exaclty what we wanted. (sorry for the horrible pic! eek!) 

There is purple in this one. A no-go with the Hubs.

This one was nice, but  I wasn't sold.  (Confession: I dislike decorating with black.)

This one had a lot of olive green tones. As I was looking to paint the walls baby blue, this was not going to work. 

There were a lot of ok options, but nothing I loved. Nothing I thought would fit in with the "image" I felt our kitchen would have. (Wow, how pretentious does that sound) I felt that the kitchen would not look "put-together" with these options.  Re-sale value is top in our minds (because even though at this point Daniel says we are never moving again, if we have three kids this house is going to get small fast, however, that time is still a ways off so no worries) so we wanted to pick something that looked nice and would keep looking nice for years to come. 

Ugh. Rock and a hard place.  Budget and Value. The great balancing act. 

So we went to Home Depot, (people there knew our names there for a while.) We were just looking at options when a very nice Orange Apron swept us off our feet.  He sat us down and sold us on (my favorite, but very expensive) Silestone. Woah. Bet you didn't see that coming. It was on sale. (my favorite word!) 15% plus if we opened a home depot credit card we could get it for an additional 10% off and have 24 months with no interest.  Usually I just say NO to all that credit card mumbo jumbo but when he worked out how much the monthly would be and the total.  I was drooling. We went home and thought about it. Asked for some wise counsel from parents and friends. 

Then we did it. We bought our counter tops. This was a big (huge!) purchase for us, but one we were excited and ready to make. 

 Here is my proud husband in our kitchen with our brand-new counters!! Yay! We chose Silestone in Merengo, it's a dark gray that I thought would look nice with the other colors I had in mind. The close up is not a super close up, but I'll post one of those when I post the "done" kitchen pictures.  

So that's it for now. 

Love,

Sarah

Sink Hunt

So this is a little out of order, I haven't shown you our counter-tops yet, but I went on this sink hunt before we found the counter-top because I knew we would have to have one. So...I'll show you the counter-tops later this week! 

Long story short: We had to get a new sink.  I didn't want to pay $$$$ for it.  So I heard about this warehouse construction sale happening downtown so my MIL and my dad went with me. It was great fun, however, they were $$$ which wasn't what I wanted.  I wanted $ and would have settled for $ 1/2. Which we did in the end. We got a sink and faucet at trusty HD for $245ish and it had a dish rack. Score. :) 

I wanted a big sink.  A big farmhouse sink if possible. 

I wanted a deep sink. Because I feel it's more useful. 

I wanted the sink to be open to be one bowl not two.  But most of these would have worked, I guess.
Except that they were so expensive and heavy(the middle one) and used (the right one), which isn't too bad, but not for me. I knew I could do better.

This one was cool, but aside from being mucho $$$$ it was so industrial, not really the vibe of our kitchen.

We bought this one from Home Depot. It's awesome. It's $230.  Which is pretty good comparatively. Not CHEAP but well worth the expense.  It's a wonderful sink! Daniel likes it.  I like it. It's a win-win-win. 

So what do ya'll think? What kind of sink do you have? Do you have a dream sink? 

Love,

Sarah

10 things I hate about Kilz

I hate the way you look to me

and the way you pour

I hate the way you smell all day

I hate it when we need more

I hate you in big dumb buckets

and the way you hide the grime

I hate when your smell makes me sick

you even make me rhyme

I hate the way you cover spots

I hate it when you dry

I hate it when I can't wash the brush

it's such a mess when I try

I hate the way you cover odors

and when you we have to haul

But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you

Not even close, 

not even a little bit, 

not even at all

Ok, so if you have ever seen 10 Things I Hate About You [If you haven't, go find it tonight] you'll recognize the classic poem that Kat reads in front of the class.  What? She isn't talking about Kilz paint? Whooops. Could have fooled me.

Ok seriously now.  Daniel and I have a love hate relationship with Kilz.   It really sucks to work with.  It's stickier and thicker than most paints.  And it STINKS.  Open a window or go outside when you use it.  It is impossible to clean up.  Even using the recommended mineral spirits it still is a beast to get an actually clean brush in the end. All of that aside.  This stuff rocks.  It really does cover odors and stains.  It is an excellent primer.

We painted our whole inside with Kilz.  Walls, Ceiling. Trim. Doors.* All of it has at least one coat of Kilz.  Sometimes two.  (Doors are still in progress)  This stuff works.

Here is Daniel wearing gloves while working with it, because otherwise you are going to rip off your skin trying to get it off before work the next day.  

This is my mom.  She loves kilz.  She gave us her extra Kilz and when we were in the hate stage of loving Kilz she volunteered to paint all the trim with Kilz if we weren't going to because "It has to be Kilzed."  She did come help us after convincing us it needed to be done.  And, yes mother, it was worth it. I am glad we did.  It helped make the old lady smoke smell go away.  We beat that smell and it didn't hurt to have the windows open and the attic fan on.  

It was great to have a "clean" slate to work with.  It made us feel like we were starting over and making it our home.  

Do you hate Kilz too? Have you used one of the fancy kinds that doesn't suck as much? (we mostly used Original) Let me know! I love comments! 

Love,

Sarah

Are you Grounded?

This is a simple [read as: kinda boring] post but something that we didn't know when we moved into our 50 year old house.  We had to check to see if our outlets were grounded.  We used this little device our friend Jeff knew about and it's genius.  It couldn't be easier.  You plug it in and it has different lights that tell you if it's grounded or not.  The directions are on the top.  It's a very useful tool. 

So most of our outlets weren't grounded, which we figured, because they were so old and because they were almost all two prong.  So another of our first [and last] tasks was to change out outlets so we could safely plug things in.  

In the photo above the old outlet is on the right and the new outlet is on the left.  [You probably could have figured that one out? Yeah I know.] Anyways, my dad and Daniel ran this new outlet into our living room because the other ones in that room weren't grounded.  We needed to be able to (safely) plug things in like lights [no overhead lighting in the living room] so this was pretty important.  Don't ask me why they set it up the way they did.  [If you would like to know leave me a comment, I will find out for you!]  We plan on replacing the old outlet receptacle [the little box with wires going in that sits behind the switch plate; it holds the little circles where the prongs go in] because some of the other's are dry rotted and we want to avoid any serious dangers that may cause [like fire, or sparks].   

This is what one of the light switches looks like. Some of them have now been replaced, but we still have quite a few to go.  It's a tedious task, but not difficult.  I will try to get Daniel to write a post soon about how to actually replace these! 

This is right inside the door.  Switch plate removed.  There are actually 4 switches right next to each other and the third one controls the lights to the kitchen. So when we [we is usually Daniel and I and/or Jeff who is teaching us how to be handy] updated the lights in the kitchen, [more to come on that later] Jeff, switched out the receptacle.  Eventually all four will be shiny bright white and NEW! Hooray!! I can't wait for that day! You can really see how nasty the other switches are in comparison.  In one of my other posts I was trying to show how much grime was on the switches and now you can really see it! 

Well, that's all I have to say about that.

Love,

Sarah

Ants on fire

          This is a kind of silly post, but if you know me,  I have a fear of ants, and that means this is serious business.  Basically, I was in a car accident one time and ended up covered in ants.   I had about 300 ant bites.  Yes, it was terrible.  But I also had a concussion, so the bites were not a huge deal.  However, the feeling of ants crawling on you (sorry, if you now feel ghost ants on you, I do) is horrible.  If there are several ants on me at once I freak out.  I can't handle that. 

((I was going to post a picture here of the bites, but lucky for you, I can't find any.  Also, you don't want to see that. I looked up pictures of ant bites and well, it's nasty.   This is Zazzle the friendly ant, popular in parts of Australia, found by me on Google))

Anyways....

Our lovely new home came with a rather large yard.  It's somewhere at 1/3 to 1/2 an acre. [When Daniel mows it, he swears its an acre. ;)  ] So in the heights of August there were several MASSIVE ant hills in our yard.   We tried ant killers and that just caused the hills to move locations.  We tried corn meal/grits.  Nothing worked.  So having a pinch of GA redneck in our blood we decided to burn those suckers out. It was pretty fun. 

 

While Daniel was inside painting ceilings or something I went outside with the old oil/gas mixture from changing the oil/gas out on the lawnmower.  I poured it on the mounds and then lit it on fire.  I did use a long handled lighter.   My parents were there and so my dad came outside to "supervise," although I think he had more fun than I did.  :)

Notice the smoke billowing out of the hole that  I made to our the gas/oil in.  It was really cool to watch, although difficult to capture in my picture.

We let them burn for several minutes before we doused them with water.  We also watched over them carefully.  As you can see these were in the middle of the grass, not in the woods or in the mulched garden area. The grass didn't catch fire because it was green and actively growing.  However, when the fire got close to edges I poured water around the edge to give it extra protection.  

**note:  I do consider myself a responsible adult.  Having two people however, is advisable.  Have a hose handy and make sure you aren't burning near pinestraw or any very dry grass.  Also, a no-brainer but don't try this close to the house.  Be smart people.**  

So, has anyone ever tried something like this? Do you have any helpful hints for getting rid of ants?  I am sure we will have more this year!  I want to make sure we can play safe in our yard with our dog!  Let me know your tips and tricks in the comments!  

Love,

Sarah