Category Archives: Kitchen
Closing out 2009
The last few weeks have been a blur for Nate and I. We scurried to finish up our big projects before the holidays and then celebrated with friends and family in our lovely house.
Below are a few photo highlights. I hope to post reveals of the front and great rooms this week!
Happy New Year!!
Painting our Great Room.
Installing countless IKEA pieces.
Updating all the old electrical plugs and switches.
Installing curtains in the dining room.
Installed New Door Knobs and Locks
Spray Painting the Wood Stove
December DIY List
So Nate and I will be hosting Christmas and New Years at our place this year. I am really excited. I love this time of year and can’t wait to get our first Christmas tree and decorate the house up!
To be ready for all the holiday cheer – we have a long list of to-dos to take care of. I just put together a calendar to keep us on track.
Here’s our December DIY List
Finish our Front Room.
This includes any final paint touch ups, installing new electrical plugs and light switches and getting the fireplace ready to use.
Buy a Couch.
Nate and I have just started looking at a section for the great room. We have decided we want a section with a chaise lounge, but have not made a final decision yet. This needs to happen early December so that we can try and get it delivered before the holidays!
Prep and Paint Great Room.
We have not finalized the color of the great room – but we think it will be a purple. We plan on waiting until we purchase our couch.
Before we paint, we have to move the wood stove is going to be moved into the shed and take down the lovely pull-up bar.
Scrape the Kitchen Floor.
We left glue all over the kitchen floor when we pulled up the 1950′s lienlium. Our quick fix was an area rug , but area rugs really don’t belong in a kitchen so its time to tackle the cover up. I plan on doing this gradually during the week nights.
Decorate for the holidays.
I’d like to get all the previously mentioned projects completed by December 15th, so I can then have ten glorious days to enjoy, deck the halls and prep for my family’s most important holiday – Christmas.
I am hoping this time line will not be too hard to keep. Knowing that there will be fun after all this work will make it easier.
Fingers crossed it all works out!!
Cleaning & Painting the Kitchen
If there is one room in the house that needed a deep cleaning its certainly the kitchen.
My painting skills are beginner to intermediate at best, but one thing I do know is how important it is to clean and prep before painting.
I spent a big chunk of my Saturday doing just that.
I pulled out two cupfuls of nails, screws and hooks. I cleaned all the surfaced with TSP. Then I taped up the molding and windows – I don’t trust myself to paint along edges with a brush (called “cutting in”) correctly.
Finally, I got to priming the cabinets and walls. I finished priming half the cabinets, drawers and walls and decided to called it a night. I was completely covered with paint and grime and desperately needed a shower.
Sunday during our trip to the home improvement store, Nate and I decided on Behr Frost as our base color for the kitchen. It’s a basic blue based neutral. We want to keep the interior as light and cool as possible.
The plan is to paint the whole kitchen this color and then if its too much white I will go back with a different wall color.
The rest of the day I continued to paint. My parents stopped by to help out.
I learned a valuable tip from my mom. She suggested that I should invest in tapered brushes for cutting in the molding and also brushes and rollers with thinner handles. We both have small hands and the thinner handles be easier for me to work with. I plan on taking her advice as my hands are killing me!
I hope to finish painting tonight. I still have half the kitchen to paint with the semigloss. Fingers crossed I get it all done!!
A full weekend
Let the home projects begin!
Nate finished teaching classes on Friday and is now ready to started working on the house.
I will go into detail a little later on exactly how we spent our weekend, but here’s a sneak peak.
Let’s Start with the Kitchen
After much deliberation, I decided to tackle the cleaning and painting the kitchen as my first home project. Cleaning and painting the cabinets and walls will allow me to move all my dishes and pantry items directly from the old kitchen to the new one.
The kitchen is a lovely shade of dusty pink. The shade covers the walls and cabinets, inside and out. The floor is the original 1952 linoleum. The ceiling is the same planked wood that is throughout the original house. The ceiling also has a skylight.
The kitchen layout is a little funky and will be a major project sometime in the future, but for now just painting everything a neutral white will suffice.
Here’s a little drawing (not to scale) of the current layout.
Other design elements of note in the kitchen:
There are mustard yellow curtains above the stove. Yes, above the stove. I have decided to call them “fire starters” because (pardon the gross-out factor) they are covered with years and years of oil and grime. I am amazed the previous owner did not start a grease fire. Seriously. They are absolutely disgusting. I was so excited to get rid of them.
The full wall of cabinets has a fold out table attached. You use the bottom cabinets as the “legs” of the table. Its cute, but its going to go.
The passage way to the dining area has a build in lattice partition. Also charming, but will be taken out.
