Lightening Up The Kitchen

When we bought our new house we inherited a  fugly kitchen.  From day one I started thinking of some inexpensive, quick fixes we could do to make it more our style until we could afford a major remodel.

The kitchen walls were painted a dark blue, and the cabinets are white on top and black on the bottom.  They are painted in flat finish and they were not primed, you know what that means, right?  When you try to clean them the paint comes off and all the dirt, oil and wine splatters are absorbed into the flat finish, leaving dingy splotches everywhere.  Even the ceiling is painted in flat white and it has wine splatters on it.  I know what you are thinking, how on earth does one get wine up on the ceiling?  It's irrelevant!

Before

 The appliances were beige and the fridge had "faux" wooden door handle. The kitchen also came with a "fabulous" faux brick back splash and an even more "fabulous" faux butcher block counter top, It's "fauxbulicious"!  I can go on and on about the negatives but let's just focus on the things that have improved since we've moved in.

Before

The first thing we tackled was to paint the walls in Behr's Irish Mist.  I had the paint matched to Glidden's premium paint and primer to save money and I used semi gloss finish to make it easy to wipe clean.  Then we replaced the appliances with our own stainless steel appliances.  We haven't changed the dishwasher yet because I have never used a dishwasher in my life, so I have no idea if I even want a new one or just add storage in it's place.

 We also switched out the overhead light fixture for this Allen + Roth ORB flushmount from Lowes.  It looks ten times better than the small, white, boob light that was there before.

Next up, I changed the white vinyl mini blinds for a nice, textured, woven shade from Home depot.  It looks like they don't carry the same ones anymore the closet match I could find was this one, Radiance Cocoa Havana bamboo roman shade.

With white vinyl mini blind

The nice, woven, textured shades

Lastly I painted the faux brick in the same paint as the walls.  Now the kitchen feels lighter and brighter and I don't hate the brick as much as I used to.

Below are some of the other things we would like to do to the kitchen in this for now phase

• Prime and paint the trim and ceiling semi gloss white.
• Sand and repaint the cabinets, the paint job was done very poorly.
• Change out the hardware on the cabinets.
• Replace the hanging light fixture over the sink with something more our style.
• Do something about the wasted space over the refrigerator.

There are a lot of other little improvements we are letting simmer before we make any decisions because we don't want to spend a lot of money on temporary fixes.  The short list above will help us get by until we save up for a major overhaul.  Sometimes taking your time before doing any extreme changes is better in the end.  This way we can get a feel for how we use the space, what works, what doesn't and what can use some improvements.  The kitchen already feels so much better with just the simple, quick fixes we've done so far.

Linking up to

Way Back Wednesday * Tuesday Talk * Create Link Inspire * If we were on a coffee date

Dreaming Up The Master Bedroom

We are dreaming up a cozy, comfy, minimalist, master bedroom to retreat to at the end of the night. Our new master bedroom is not huge but it is the biggest bedroom we have ever had.  It has a couple of good aspects about it as well as some bad ones too.  We also have a lot of key pieces that we need and love but it's not put together in a way that reflects our style.  I have pinned lots and lots of bedroom ideas in hopes that some day I can transition them into our bedroom.

  The master bedroom in our last home was about 11' x 12'.  We made very good use of every inch of space we had.   Below are some pictures of our old bedroom.

I made a pros and cons list of our new bedroom.

Pros

• Three ample closets = lots of storage. 
• Three medium sized windows = natural light.
• A half bathroom. 
• Bigger size than what we've had before.

Cons

• Too many doorways and windows leaving us with limited options for furniture placement.
• No overhead lighting.   
• The only room in the house that is carpeted, I prefer hardwood. 
• No bathtub or shower in the bathroom.
• The whole room including walls and trim were once painted in oil base paint, of course I noticed after we painted, now we have peeling paint. 
• We still have a lot of trim to paint with all those doors and windows.
• All the doors are mismatched louvered doors too, I really don't like them.

The good thing is most of the cons are cosmetic things we can change.  The limited options for furniture placement isn't such a big deal.  I like the wall where the headboard is right now and that's our biggest piece of furniture.  What makes up for it is that in return we have lots of storage.  I try to look at the bright side of things.  We don't have overhead lighting but I get to have lots of lamps, I love lamps.  Sure it's a carpeted room but at least the rug is new, plush and a neutral color that we can work with.  The bathroom doesn't have a shower but we only had one bathroom in our last place so it's a treat to have a second bathroom.  So the room definitely has some things going for it.  I'm really happy that we have more space and storage.  

As for the pieces that we love and want to keep, number one would be our headboard and bed frame combination. We designed and built that beast with our own two hands.  It weighs a ton but it's definitely our favorite piece in the room, that stays!  
*The papers on the wall are pictures that my daughter makes for me and tapes them on the wall for me, she's so sweet.

Next up is my dresser, its a Mid-century piece that I refinished a couple years ago.  It is very well built and that is my favorite thing about it.  The six drawers give us lots of more storage for smaller clothing pieces.  I might try moving it over to the other wall across from where it is because I have a matching tall dresser that I want to redo for my hubby and I think it would look better on this wall.  So we will see how that works out later on.

The wall lamps flanking the headboard are new, we bought them for this room and we love them.  I like that they don't take up any surface space from our nightstands.

The nightstands are standby pieces until we build or buy new ones.  The one on my husbands side was built completely out of scrap pieces of wood we had laying around.   My side has a campaign one that I found on craigslist.  But like I said they are temporary solutions.

The trunk at the foot of the bed, I would love to keep but I'm not sure because... Once upon a time we had a nice leather bench at the foot of the bed that was always covered in clean laundry and bed covers so I got rid of it.  Now it lives with my sister and brother in law and is covered in their bed linens and laundry (ha, ha, ha, ha...evil laugh). The End!

 I love looking at my Master Bedroom Pinterest board it makes me smile but when I look at our actual bedroom it makes me yawn (pun intended).  A couple of things that I noticed from my pins are...

• The spaces are minimal, there's not lots of furniture pieces or bedding.
• They look cozy because of all the layered textures and materials.
• Most of them have white walls with mostly neutral colors as accents.
• Greenery, plants.

In order to incorporate some of these aspects, I will start by only keeping the furniture pieces that I need.  This is harder for me than most people because I love furniture, it's what I do, I redesign furniture.  I do want some different nightstands though, I was thinking maybe some floating ones.  Keeping bedding to a minimum is easy, I feel like I have that down packed.  I hate extra fluff on the bed because I don't like making the bed, so if there's a lot of stuff that needs to be put back on the bed, chances are I wont be making the bed (I hope my mom isn't reading this post!). 

For coziness, I can switch out the pillow shams for something with a bit more pattern or texture and maybe add one long throw pillow in the middle.  Our blanket might not be the prettiest but its warm and cozy for us and the colors are neutral so that stays until we can afford one something of better quality.  Some window treatment will help warm up the space too but I'm still not sure if I want to go with my usual woven shades plus drapes combo or something more simple like fabric roman shades.  We also need to add some wall art.

We already painted the room when we first moved in, the color is nice light and I have yet to paint all the trim in white so that should lighten up the room a bit more.  I also want to paint all the the doors black.

Adding a couple plants in here will bring in some color and another element of nature, while still keeping everything pretty neutral.  I've said before that my goal is to one day have plants in every single room of the house.  So far the only rooms that don't have any plants are the bedrooms and they really should,  since plants are good for cleaning air pollutants.

So it looks like I have my work cut out for me.  I can't wait to see all of these ideas come together so that we can have a cozy, comfortable, uncluttered space to relax in at night.