Finishing Touches

This title may be misleading.  While I did add a few finishing touches to the kitchen before Trey's parents visited recently (including working on the stencil I just told you about), I feel like I'll be adding finishing touches in the kitchen for months...maybe even years, to come. 

When we bought the house, in addition to having terrible navy laminate, the peninsula also had this weird three-tiered thing going on.

When we had the counters redone, we liked the idea of a rounded edge jutting out past the end of the cabinets, but we did not like the other shelves.  Unfortunately, we had our floors redone before our kitchen so that bottom shelf HAD to stay or else we would have uncovered unfinished flooring.  So we just knocked the middle one out (sorry for the lack of a good in-progress picture),

then spackled and painted over the evidence, and added a tall vase with white flowers.

Just one more thing about the kitchen that makes us feel like this is transforming from our house, into our home!

IT'S FINISHED!!

Finally!  Our kitchen no longer has the ugly green wall!

On Monday, this was on our counters.

On Tuesday, our kitchen looked like this!

We hired someone to put it in and boy, are we glad!  We went with a bone colored subway tile to match the cabinet color and keep the light feel we started with the counters going.  The kitchen looks infinitely better and we couldn’t be happier with the results!

After finishing the tile, I turned my attention to the one section of the wall that I didn’t paint.  That section in the corner of the kitchen is covered with something (particle board, sheet rock, I don't have a clue). 

Since we have a stainless fridge now, that significantly cuts down on the amount of stuff we can magnetically hang in the kitchen.  So...I thought I might paint that corner with magnetic paint.  I’d read where other people had used it with some success so I went to Home Depot and got some.

It recommended painting on 3 light coats vs 2 heavy coats.  Little did I know, that it was BLACK paint.  I immediately worried because I had planned on covering it with green and a yellow stencil! 

Needless to say, the green covered well in 2 coats, and the stencil did well over the green.

Here’s a closer look at the actual pattern.

I used Behr paint again, so if you ever need to cover a black wall in 2 coats, use Behr!  For the stencil, I traced it on the wall in pencil and then covered it with yellow.  I initially tried to paint it on using a Behr color sampler and paintbrush.  That didn’t work out so well so I just used a yellow acrylic paint pen from Hobby Lobby.  I cut both a full copy of the stencil along with 2 halves to make tracing that thing easier in the corners.

The stencil was a cheap way to add some color and character to the kitchen, but it was incredibly time consuming.  I don’t think I would ever stencil an entire wall like Jones Design Company did (which was where I got the free stencil).  I didn’t total up how long it took me to do the painting, but I had to put three coats of magnetic paint, plus two coats of green paint, plus the time it took to cut it in around the molding and that newly placed grout.  Tracing the stencil in pencil took about 45 minutes and going over with the yellow paint pen took 2.5 HOURS (I had to go over it twice to make it opaque enough over the green).  Again, cheap for a custom wallpaper look that's also magnetic (approximately $25 in paint, free stencil, $0.39 cardboard, and $5 paint pen), but time consuming for such a small piece of the kitchen.  I’ll probably end up using both of the left over paints (lots of it) elsewhere too.

With that and the completion of our tile backsplash our kitchen is now complete!  Thank God!  And it only took us 9 months…

Just a reminder, here’s a final before and after.

Before:

 After:

Matching Cabinets and Other Kitchen Progress

Our sunroom has looked like this, or some small variation of this, for a great deal of time.

The new cabinets that we got as part of our kitchen makeover are white.  The rest of our cabinets are not.  The color is mind-numbingly close to white (when not compared side by side), but very un-white upon close inspection.

So I set about the task of painting them all a custom-matched color.  For the backs, I just rolled on 2 coats because who really looks at the backs?  For the fronts and all the trim around the cabinet doors, I took a different route.  I added some Floetrol to my latex paint to reduce brush strokes and make the finish really smooth (I brushed the fronts instead of rolling them).  I also lightly sanded the cabinet doors in between coats of paint to help with the smooth finish.

So we went from this,

to this!

This post has been a long time coming, so long in fact that we've almost finished the rest of the kitchen.  We talked with a tile guy and have settled on a bone colored (same as the cabinets) subway tile for our backsplash.  He should be here next week to install it.  We also settled on this new gray color for the walls (Graceful Gray by Behr Ultra Premium Plus).

 I also finally got that cheese plate finished with a white and green damask patterned piece of craft paper and some faux lemons.

 

That, along with the new sets of kitchen towels I got are the start to my new neutral kitchen with splashes of green and yellow!

We are hoping to be completely finished with the kitchen by the end of June.  We'll see how that time table works out... :)

Imperfect Wood

Just an FYI I've learned since owning an old home that I thought I would share.  Old houses don't have the most seamless finishes when it comes to the woodwork.  Example, this window in the master bath is old.

Just look at how the molding under the bottom ledge of the window is starting to separate.

I'm not a woodworker nor am I particularly good with anything more sophisticated than an allen wrench so this would not be a job I would tackle and it's not important enough to me to hire someone to do it.  So, just a little white wood filler (which is also great for filling in nail holes or other wood imperfections) and it's pretty close to being as good as new!

Boring I know, but I've done several boring things since getting an older home that I never really pictured myself doing, like caulking a bathtub

or spackling (is that even a word?) over a hole in a wall (no pic for that one).  Boring stuff is also part of the reason why there is such a long time between my interesting posts, at least that's what I'm telling myself. :)

We finally have bedroom furniture!

First of all, I am a terrible blogger.  I apologize for not posting anything for weeks and then bombing the site with 5 new blogs.  It seems as if I'm a little manic when it comes to this thing!  Nonetheless, here's the post everyone has been asking about....we finally got master bedroom furniture!

When we moved into this house we had two beds - one that I've had since I was about 18...

and one that I got on Craig's List just before we moved in.

Both beds were nice, but neither one was what we wanted for our master bedroom.  We figured we could just live in one of the guest bedrooms until we found some furniture and our master could just be another storage room.  Six long months later, we got this king sleigh bed suit from a very gracious family friend!  It consists of a king sleigh bed complete with tempurpedic-like mattress (shown here with some assembly shots) and two night stands (which happen to sit perfectly below each window on that wall),

armoire,

dresser with octagonal mirror,

and a captain's chest that was too large to fit in our room so we put it in one of the guest rooms (ignore the still un-finished remnants of the mirror collage on the bed)!

Trey and TJ moved it all from Nashville down to Montgomery in one day in TJ's sweet drag car trailer. 

We can't thank him enough for helping us out because man, was that furniture heavy!

My plan was to get really nice bedding for this bed since it was "ours" but I haven't really had the time to follow through yet.  I'd love to get something in all white like this from Pottery Barn,

and paint the walls charcoal and use a dramatic color for window treatments and accent pillows but we'll see how that all works out.  I'm afraid Cooper will make it hard for us to keep white bedding white!

Yippee for yard sales!

I love a good find.  Love.  It.  I tend to get lots of them at the flea market, but just recently I found some at a yard sale in my neighborhood.  The lovely family used to have an antiques booth at a different flea market than the one I usually go to, but had taken their stuff out of the booth and were just having a plain old fashioned yard sale.  I had not yet met these particular neighbors of mine so when I saw they were having a yard sale I figured what better time to stop by and say hello!  I sure am glad I did!!

There is a small triangluar void between Trey's leather chair and the loveseat which is almost impossible to find an end table for.  This means there isn't really anywhere for Trey to put a beverage in between sips since our coffee table is centered on the sofa.  Bummer.  Enter a $25 marble-topped plant stand which could also conveniently double as an end table of sorts and voila,

problem solved!

The other three items I picked up were less for function and more for aesthetics.  I found out from Ms. Rosalin that the small dresser I got from my dad was actually used as a wash basin when it was originally built.  She had a similar wash basin at her yard sale with this pitcher and bowl on top and I thought it made the perfect accessory for the dresser that will now hold towels and toiletries in one of our guest bedrooms since there are clothes in what could be used as a linen closet.

I also picked up two chairs for $25 each.  I'm not crazy about the fabric, but the lines of the frame and the porcelain rollers had me at hello so I grabbed them with the intention of having them reupholstered in something charcoal for the sunroom.

Ms. Rosalin also referred me to a guy that has reupholstered similar chairs like these for her before. 

Great neighbors, great finds!