We actually have a couple projects to share. In the last couple months, we replaced the kitchen flooring and built a bench over the radiator. Here is where we started over a year ago: The lovely original hardwoods throughout the first floor had been covered in layer after layer of plywood and linoleum. The orange […]
kitchen
Re-painting the kitchen cabinets
The base cabinets in our kitchen looked horrible. It wasn’t the cabinets themselves, it was the finish. As with much of the house, their paint job was pretty terrible. It was streaky and bumpy, which made lots of grooves for oils and dirt to collect, and they were badly stained all around the handles. Which […]
Free slate trays
I’m short. Really short. 5 feet even, actually. With 20+ years of practice, I can get around just find in a world built for people significantly taller than me (unless there’s a glass item I need on the top shelf at the grocery store–I still haven’t figured that one out). But there is a disadvantage […]
Cheap industrial lighting to replace an ugly ceiling fan
We have new lights in the kitchen. Behold, our DIY cheap industrial lighting: We finally took down the big old ceiling fan over in the breakfast area and added this industrial-looking light. We have a matching one over the kitchen sink to, which you’ll see soon. This is SUCH an easy DIY. All they are […]
DIY wall art for the kitchen
Last week, we put bamboo blinds on the naked kitchen windows. I thought it would help with the empty feeling of the breakfast area, but it kind of made it worse. It was too stark of a contrast in the sea of white. Curtains would help, but they aren’t possible because of the positions of […]
Silly half wall
When you walk into our house, you enter into the living room. If you look straight ahead, you are facing the dining room, and the kitchen beyond that. This is what it looks like: Is it a half-wall or just a wall with a hole in it? A pass-through? I’ve never liked this wall. It’s […]
The big kitchen reveal
Ready for the kitchen before and after? Here is the before–not terrible, but not what we wanted: And here is what it looks like now: We love how open and simple it is. And it’s the perfect balance of masculine and feminine for us. (And not at all preppy.) The handmade iron brackets give the […]
We did it!
Our new kitchen shelves are finally installed. As usual, we made adjustments to the plan as we went. The shelves to the left of the stove were going to go all the way to the corner, but we liked it better with the shorter shelves, and there is still enough room for our dishes. We […]
The shelves for the open shelving
Along with many other random building materials, we have a single raw, pine stair tread in the dining room. When I originally had the idea to ditch the upper kitchen cabinets for open shelving, of course, I first had to pitch the idea to the Hubs. So I grabbed that stair tread and put it […]
Beautiful brackets
We splurged on the pretty brackets for our open shelving in the kitchen. We went back and forth and debated about which brackets to choose from the home improvement stores, and online hardware stores, but we weren’t crazy about any of them. So I checked Anthropologie. Of course, they were more expensive than everyone else, […]
How to paint a range hood, from stainless steel to white
Isn’t it funny that affordable wall-mounted range hoods so often only come in stainless now? It used to be the most expensive. So what do you do when you don’t like stainless and your appliances are white? You paint a range hood. We purchased ours from IKEA, but they don’t sell that one anymore. There’s a similar […]
A practical, $25 kitchen upgrade
Aside from the whole remodeling of the kitchen, there is one pretty small upgrade that we made that is really going to make a big difference for us. The kitchen came with 12 electrical outlets (not including 4 in the attached breakfast nook). We had three appliances that stayed plugged in at all times, the […]
White walls in the kitchen
We are making progress in the kitchen. Last time you saw it, it looked like this: We were hoping to re-use the vent for the new range hood, but the hole was almost 2 feet too low and it was the wrong shape. So we put a new hole in the wall and patched the […]
Kitchen style
Now that we have removed the kitchen cabinets, we’ve been trying to plan how the new kitchen will look. I keep trying to make the mood board, but the software is acting up. So I’m going through all of my inspiration photos on Pinterest. I’ve noticed that there are basically two ways people design kitchens […]
And on a whim, the kitchen renovation has begun
Hello again! After another round of apparent renovation-burn-out, the Hubs and I got some serious work done yesterday. When we started the morning, I didn’t realize the burn-out-bug had left us yet, so I was expecting to just get something relatively small and non-blog worthy done like cleaning the basement–again. So when the Hubs left […]
The cupboards are bare
Another room that was majorly simplified before the yard sale was the kitchen. When I was in my late teens, I purchased a full set of dishes. This wasn’t just the 16 piece box with 4 place settings. This was 96 a piece set, service for 12. They were simple, white dishes, Martha Stewart brand […]
