Cabinet Liners

So this post is pretty simple, but I think it's a cute detail so I thought I would share.  

Because our cabinets are 50 years old and when we cleaned them there was so much dirt (etc.) trapped in the stain we decided it would give us peace of mind about using all of our dishes if we put liners inside the cabinets and drawers. 

Well of course, that got me thinking about finding something cute to put there.  I realize I haven't shared all of the kitchen with you yet, but I will soon, just one more detail to finish! ;-) 

For the colors in the kitchen I tried a fairly retro combination: cherry red and baby blue.  The cabinets (you can read about those here) are a light grey and the counter tops (more on those here) are dark grey.  You don't know it yet, but the kitchen floors are white with grey grout.  So I felt like with all that grey I could play with some bright colors!  My original intention was to put red accent tiles on the floor, but we decided that would be visually overwhelming.  I still really wanted my red accents, so these liners were the perfect solution!  

The liner themselves are made out of what is called oil cloth.  It is a laminated canvas or cotton.  The laminated part means that there is a plastic/vinyl type "seal" on the top, but it is also thicker than contact paper, which means it is far more durable.   This stuff is also very easy to clean, just wipe it down! Once I had settled on oil cloth I had to find a cute one with a red and white print.  I settled on Fabric.com's red and white polka dots!  They are so cute and fit perfectly with my sort of "retro" theme.  I ordered 8 yards and simple measured and cut to fit.  I have tons left over.  I am glad I over estimated though, I would rather have too much than too little! 

I might even make a cute tablecloth out of the extra. (The one below I found on Oilclothaddict.com, via pinterest.) I would love to put elastic around the edges so that it's easy to take outside and clean off!  

Ok, enough about that, this is how I did it: Measure. Cut.  Trim.  Spray Adhesive (outside).  Stick in Place.  Adjust.  Smooth.  Next Piece.   

It's a pretty simple process, however it was made slightly more complex because I had to take everything out of the cabinets.  The silver lining in that is that it gave me the opportunity to move things around in the kitchen while I had everything out.   

As you can see, I didn't get all the wrinkles out and some of the pieces will have to be trimmed still.  And to be honest, I still have about 1/3 of the cabinets/drawers left to finish.  Let's face it, blogs aren't always a perfect as they seem.  I am trying to give a true (but typically cleaner than usual) representation of our life at the Foster house.  It's not perfect, but neither are we.  PTL. 

Do you love it as much as I do? Do you hate it? Do you have any experience with Oilcloth?  Don't you love it!!?  It's an impressive fabric, and becoming a favorite. :)

Until next time,

Sarah

New water heater...wooo

So this is a VERY basic thing that most of us don't think about very often.  

Hot Water.

It's a commodity that we use EVERY day, that in parts of the world is a luxury or very uncommon.

We are very grateful to have hot water. 

We had a water heater.  It was big and was heating the water just fine.  However, it was quite old as far as water heaters go.  (I think it was early to mid 90's or thereabouts) In any case, out inspector Aaron and our good friend Jeff (The Christmas Craftsman and Electricity Guru) suggested that we replace it before it became an issue.   So we shopped around and of course we bought one from Home Depot (We love Orange, what can we say).  So Jeff and Daniel were uninstalling the old one and putting in the new one.  The old one wouldn't drain properly so they had to wheel it over to the door and dump it outside. It was pretty exciting.  So I filmed it. 

Well that's about it.  I think I need to get Daniel to write about some of his experiences, because he knows more about the details of projects like this one. 

 I wasn't super helpful with this and many other projects concerning electrical and gas.  My role was much more design oriented. However, all of these nitty gritty things are the unseen important things that we don't think about very often and I am very glad that they are all in working order!!

UPDATE from Daniel: Here are the details about this one: 1. Thank you, Jeff! 2. Well worth the $400 or so for the water heater and hookups. 3. Scary! The reason it wouldn't drain is because it was clogged with sediment of some kind (yuck...) - that meant that we had to move a full tank across the basement and over the basement threshold on a handtruck. The sketchy part was it was on a 4 leg, 1 foot riser, so we used a piece of plywood to actually fit it onto the surface of the dolly. It was a delicate balancing act to put it lightly. So, we successfully wheeled it to the doorway where it finally crossed the bar, so to speak. 

Home Depot let us put it on the 24 month deferred interest card along with A LOT of other stuff because some awesome saint of the orange cloth had mercy on our idea of a "single renovation project," including countertops, water heater, flooring, paint and supplies, and a laundry list of things I can't even recall. 

While I'm on the subject of Home Depot... Know that all Home Depots are not created equal. I don't want to single out any specific store, but don't give up on the place if you have a bad experience at one. That is all. 

love,

Sarah

Foster House Color Palette

When we started choosing paint colors for the house I was a little bit overwhelmed.  We were spending SO much money on things I knew I wanted to try to find some paints on sale.  I had read that people were finding "oops" paint or "mistints" for a fraction of the list price at Home Depot and Lowes.  Whenever we were at Home Depot or Lowes I started looking in the paint section when we weren't even under contract yet.  If I found a color I liked I bought it.  

When we finally got into our house and cleaned and kilzed and were ready for color we had to decide where all the colors would go.  That was the hard part.   I sat down and looked at the colors we had: a soft grey-ish blue, a pale green, light blue, silvery gray and a mushroom.  I had some ideas of where I wanted things.  The light blue was for the kitchen, to give it a retro look.  I planned to pair it with a bright red. The mushroom was for the living room.  But I didn't know where the other colors would go.   I decided to sit down and plan it out, with Daniel of course.

 

Side note: I LOVE HGTV magazine. They always have such great ideas! I always feel so inspired. So while I was at Barnes and Noble I read some of one and found some amazing paint ideas.  I didn't use any that they suggested but I love that they have them ALL listed in the back! [Also, sometime I would love to do a colored grout between white tiles. genius.] I did decide from this magazine that I should choose a whole house color scheme so it would be cohesive when/if ever we sold it. :) 

This painting is one of a trio that were given to us for our wedding, painted especially for us by one of my mother-in-love's friends.  (For those of you who aren't catching on to the irony here, my maiden name is Beach...get it now? good!)

I looked at the colors we had and the ones I was thinking about and it was a very beachy/coastal color scheme.  Lucky for me, Labor Day sales were around the corner.  The paint we hadn't already bought we ended up buying on sale in the colors we wanted. 

(all these samples are not completely accurate but are approximate, 

if you want an actual name I can find it for ya!)

What rooms are these colors in? (L-R as follows)

Silver/gray: Dining room

Light blue: Kitchen

Mushroom gray/brown: Living room

Seafoam green: Craft Room/Office

White: Hallway

Sandy Tan: Guest room/book room

Storm Gray/Brown: Master bath

Sunshine Yellow:Guest bath

Silvery gray blue: Master bedroom

We really like it.  It feels homey. 

I'll post pictures of painting each of the rooms when I do updates on what each room looks like now. 

What do you think? Do you see the "beach" in our color scheme? 

love,

Sarah

progress in kitchen and dining room

I just wanted to show off some of our latest projects.  Our new lights in the kitchen and dining rooms and a pots and pans hanger.  Yipppee!

Today I thought I would share a little about our dining room light fixture.  I had seen this paint at Target but had no need for it at the time. (Also I was wondering why in the world Target was selling paint? Strange.)  It's a perfectly lovely shade of pale, pale green. 

We wanted to return the light fixture that we had lived in the dining room for 49 years to it's place, but it was in need of a good makeover.  Our wonderful friend Jeff took it apart (he helped us with MOST of the wiring that was in dire need of updating.)  

I painted all the pieces.  It took several coats.  While the color of Target's paint was beautiful it wasn't the best for coverage.  It probably isn't very durable either, but that doesn't matter so much on the light fixture.  

After it was painted Jeff helped us to reattach it to the ceiling.  He also picked out these awesome light bulbs that look fantastic without the bulky globes.  

[More on Jeff and his awesome Electrical Skills]

http://www.christmascraftsman.com/

He has all kinds of awesome video tutorials and info about vintage lights!

One more bonus picture: 

This is my mother-in-love's front porch from this last Christmas, courtesy of the Christmas Craftsman, aka. Jeff. 

love,

Sarah

Cabinets

 Just to recap, this is what the kitchen looked like before.  It was COVERED in that orange-y wood.  It was everywhere. Even the walls. It was a little bit charming, in a woodsy cabin kind of way, but not for us.  We removed the two horseshoe shotgun holders that were above the door and we began to see potential.

Let me give you a brief recap on what happened.  I don't have pictures of all of this unfortunately.  :-(

My parents took the doors off (we didn't label them!) We used this stuff called citrus-strip on the doors to take off the finish.  This was grueling labor.  Fifty year old Varnish doesn't come off easily.  We probably should have done two kinds of varnish/stain remover or two passes of the citrus strip and a washing with mineral oil in between but I was so very over it that  I didn't.

After the counter-tops were in I knew I wanted the cabinets to be gray too.  I sort of hated to cover up all the wood, because it was beautiful, just too much pine.  So my thought was to do a gray "whitewash."  Well my friends, it seems that this is not a common choice because there was very little to choose from.

I really wanted to use a product like the ones below because I thought it would be easier, but alas, they didn't have any in Gray.  :-(

We ended up with a water based tinted gray that was really dark, a white wash that was called pickled white and a clear sealer.  I was impatient so I sort of blended them together.  to get the look I was after.  These were some of the samples that I tried on an inconspicuous area. (As a side note: we didn't get the wood that clean, that is untouched wood that was previously covered by the laminate backsplash and the inside of a cabinet.) 

Another reason that this was a bad sample of what it would look like later is that this was raw wood and almost everywhere else had been stripped, but still had a slight stain to it. 

This is how they turned out.  for some reason there is a slight pink/orange hue.  It is probably because  I didn't do the whitewash before I did the graywash. But who knows.   I think they look pretty cool.  Daniel likes them too.  (We spray painted the hardware: first with a metal primer in white and then in a oil rubbed bronze, two coats, more on that at another time!)

If I had it to do all over again I would do a few things slightly different:
1) I would be more patient. (Ugh, yes I was VERY impatient about getting it done, but now I wish I had taken more time.) 
2) I would do a whole coat in the whitewash, then a whole coat in the gray-wash, then a whole coat in the pickling whitewash. (That's why I was so impatient, I sort of smeared all those together in 1 coat)
3) I would have also done the inside of the doors.
4) While we are on doors, I would have labeled them from the start. Big mistake!
5)  I wish I had known more about Chalk paint.  I think I would have considered it. (Maybe it isn't off the table)


Well next time I'll show you the floors and then what the kitchen looks like now!

love,

Sarah

when old is made new

So the floors when we bought the house were as follows:

Kitchen- "Vintage" Linoleum/Sheet Vinyl (we didn't know yet, but there were three layers)

Dining room, all three bedrooms, living room, hallway and closets-Nasty nasty beige carpet

Guest bath-original blue one inch tiles

Master bath- nasty cheap sheet vinyl (I say cheap because they do make classy sheet Vinyl

We decided that all the flooring needed to go, except the original blue bathroom tiles. We think they are charming. :) 

How did we know what was under the carpet? Let me back up a minute.  On one of our walk-throughs before we bought the house, the Realtor helped us pull up a corner of the carpet to see what was underneath.  To our astonishment there were original 50 year old hardwood floors underneath. Score. 

Naturally we  KNEW that we would rip out the old carpet, I mean, smoke smell, old smell, musty smell.  It had to go.  However, we waited until we had painted all the walls to rip out the carpet because then we didn't need to buy drop cloths and risk ruining the hardwoods.

We knew when we looked at the hardwoods under the carpet that it would need refinishing.  They weren't in horrible shape but not good shape either.  There were stains from what we assume were cats and or leaking plants or spills that didn't get cleaned up.  There were also some uneven spots (divots in the floor, small rises and falls) but they were small.  There was one place next to the kitchen where we thought that the lady mopped often with too much water. But overall, we were blessed with what seemed to be good solid floors with only minor flaws.  

They might look bad in this picture that was taken right after the carpet was pulled out, but most of that is dust and dirt.  They cleaned up pretty good. 

We looked at tons of different stains.  I took pictures of samples at stores so I could look at them later. It was agonizing.  It felt like such a big huge decision.  I had to decide what we were going to look at on the floor for possibly years to come.  I wanted a "style" that was easygoing and would "grow" with the house. Not something trendy.  

So many options for stain! Ugh!Which brand is best? What is the difference with gel stain? Is that like gel nails? It's just stronger? What color should we use? Dark or Medium? It was driving me mad!

When the men arrived to resurface the floors they looked mostly like this:

 

With some stains like these: 

When I arrived at the house after work and the floors looked like this: 

Wow! Wow! Wow! what a difference! They sanded them down and got all of the previous stain and poly (polyurethane, the clear sealer) off.  There were still some stains that lingered on,

This is one of the stains that lingered.  Some of the rough uneven spots were patched.  I'm not sure what this stuff is called, but it worked wonders.  The picture on the right is the spot near the kitchen where we guessed water from a mop continually leaked into the carpet and onto the floors.  It was the one spot we thought might need replacing.  But, Hallelujah! They fixed it!! 

 I think that seeing the raw floors helped us make our stain color choice.   It was clear to us at this point that a darker stain would be best.  So the men that were resurfacing our floors said they had two options for us to choose from.  They did some test spots. 

 We chose the bottom one.  It's called dark walnut.  We felt it showed off the wood grain better. It also hid some of the stains that were left after sanding.  

Let me tell you...

When I came home and saw what they did...

I was

floored. 

hahaahaha. 

Ok, here's the picture you've been waiting for:

So pretty!! The one on the left is the day they finished them (back in late September) 

The one on the right is from late March (earlier this week.) They are less shiny, but still beautiful!  Even with our new doggy running on them and dropping his bones everywhere.  If you know where to look you can find some of the stains, but they don't look like stains, just variations in the wood. People always comment on how lovely the floors are.  It's a wonderful feeling.  

Side note: we also had the floor refinishers put in the quarter round on the bottom.  This covered the space where the carpet was covering the baseboard when we painted it.  There were some spots we touched up, but it saved us a lot of tough labor. 

We did pay for this service.  The man that inspected our home before we bought it is a friend of ours.  He fixed a couple of things right after we moved in (switching our oven/range from electric to gas, etc.)  What I'm trying to say is he is incredibly handy!  He bought a house last year and started refinishing his own floors and he ended up hiring someone to finish.  Because we had so much floor to resurface and we had no idea how to do it, we felt it was too much for us to tackle.  

It was a pretty penny, but we are glad that we paid someone else and got it done the right way.  We also saved ourselves a lot of stress and marriage counseling. ;-) 

We still have one little untouched spot of original hardwoods for posterity. The little closet in the bathroom is hardwood and never had carpet on it and we didn't have them refinish it to match.  

A little gem in the history of our house.

What about YOU? Do you have any tips about flooring? Did any of you DIY your floors? I would love to hear about it! Leave me a comment and thanks for reading!

Later gator,

Sarah