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

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