Kitchen almost complete (again)

When we first moved into our house I decided to paint our kitchen cabinets.  I finished them in an aged white but I just didn't love the finish.  Soooo  in October I repainted the cabinets and I am so much happier.

I'll take you back to the beginning ...

This is our Kitchen on the day we moved in.

And this is how it looks now.

I do have a couple of things to finish still, I painted the brass foot rail in oil rubbed bronze and it needs to be put back on along with a piece of base board I picked up for the island too.  There are also a couple of areas I need to touch up, I feel like I need a few days off to finish this project.

We picked up some counter stools on Kijiji last year, and at first I thought they were perfect but they became a catch all for my purse, and coats.  They were attracting clutter and driving me crazy.

These are the stools we initially purchased which are now for sale on Kijiji.

These are the stools I purchased to go in their place.  I had to have them and Overstock does not ship these stools to Canada so I signed up with MyUs.com and paid for a personal shopper to purchase the stools for me then had them shipped to Canada.  This process ended up doubling the price of the stools but it was worth it to me since I had to have them.

I will do one more post on the kitchen once the foot rail and baseboard are in place with the new stools.

I hope everyone had a fabulous holiday!

I'm linking to ...

Kitchen Storage solution ...

First, let me tell you how excited I am that our kitchen is almost complete.  Yippee!  We just have to complete the Island trim and paint it, oh and there's one wall that has been patched so it needs paint.  Then DONE!  Finito! Wooo Hooo!

I was off work this past week and had a mission to check a few things off the to do list.  I don't know what it is but if I don't stay busy with small projects I'll nap the day away.  Then I'd be all grumpy when I go back to work if I hadn't accomplished anything.  But, hey, that's not the case so all is good!

OK, now that my self analysis is over, back to our Kitchen Storage solution.  For the last 10 years I have had a Hanging Pot Rack for easy access to cookware.  When we moved to our new house in June we knew the Pot Rack would be too large for this house so we gave it to a friend.  The Pot Rack looked something like this one ...

We have been here 7 months and both Frank and I have hated wrestling with pots in the cupboard so we had to do something.  I suggested some sort of Wall Pot Rack. Usually at this point I need to give Frank a visual so he knows what I am thinking.   I didn't want too spend much, so the plan was to go to Ikea and pick up this Grundtal wall shelf with some S hooks, maybe one of those hanging pot thingies too.

I was procrastinating, I did not feel like packing a lunch for the road trip to Ikea, I did some searching online to see if there was another solution that I could pick up from a local store.   While I was doing this, Frank came up with a brilliant idea to use a shelf I had originally bought to use as a mantle.

We had the darker of the 3 shelves shown above but it wasn't rustic enough so I painted and distressed it, then went to the local hardware store and picked up some hooks for $2.78.  Porter, an American Labrador Retriever helped me find the right hooks (next time I'll take a pic of him, he has the best face)

and there you have it ... One Beautiful and functional pot rack!  No more clanging pots at dinner time!

Taaa Daaa!

I'm going to link up with Donna and everyone over at Funky Junk Saturday Nite Special #77

Progress Update, and I'd love your opinion ...

Our home is open concept so it's hard to take pictures of updates when we are working on both the kitchen and living room.  Frank has been busy working away while I'm at the office, we're almost there!

Here is a quick peak at the Distressed Kitchen Cabinets, I will apply a coat of Minwax poly to the finished cabinets.

Next, Frank has been working on the faux brick.  I have not been able to capture any action shots since I have been at the office while he's creating.  He is applying drywall compound to the walls then carving out the brick, these are not perfectly straight bricks, we wanted something that was going to look more rustic and old.  Here is the wall with the drywall compound applied ...

Painting of the brick and shelf are on the agenda for this weekend.
Here is the shot of the fireplace and the wall.

It will be so different once the painting is complete, here is the before again

Here's where I need your opinion, last week I mentioned a deal I got on the Home Depot website for a chandelier.  We put it up on the weekend, it's smaller then we imagined but we are OK with it for now. (It's so much better then the Boob light).  Here is a pic.

 I just realized I never got a picture of the Boob light while it was up, I have to get a shot of it before it goes to it's new home ... where ever that may be.  It's actually a Nice Boob light as far as they go, just not my preference.  So my question is .... Shades or No Shades?  I took a shot with one blue toile shade on it, I'm just wondering if the light is too small for shades.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Jo

The Makeover Continues ...

I have completely neglected blogging lately, mostly due to the fact that none of our projects are complete yet.  Wow, what a roller coaster ride!  It's amazing how each colour decision affects the next.

As per my last post we started off priming the whole living room and kitchen.  The initial plan was to paint both rooms Behr Butter Cookie yellow but last minute we wondered how a nice fresh light blue might look (Ok, it was after Frank watched a show on HGTV and saw a great paint colour in a room that had similar window light and trim as our rooms)  So, he called me at work we discussed it and I picked up some sample pots of paint on my way home.  Here are the samples on the wall:

Yuk!  the yellow isn't working and the blue is looking too grey.

Luckily Frank recorded the show with the blue paint he liked so we watched it together.  We actually paused the show on screen for over an hour while we discussed our paint selection.  Then we were off to HD to purchase Wave Crest ...

Ok, so we have our blue!  Above just shows one coat of Wave Crest around the window.  Of course, every trip to HD & each decorating show we watch the decor plan gets "tweaked", we had a brief lapse while at HD and were going to use a brick wallpaper behind the gas stove in the LR so we had multiple samples of wallpaper hanging up behind the stove ... can you say "head spinning!"

Now, on to painting the kitchen cabinets, white.  After our weekend of painting the dog woke me in the middle of the night to go out, our living room is this beautiful light blue as is our kitchen and the kitchen cabinets had a very light coat of white on them and it was a full moon ... OMG!  It's so white in here!  It does not look right.  What now?  Well I asked Frank what he thought of the colours and he was undecided.  HGTV was calling him once again!  So while I was at work he called me with a new blue for just the kitchen walls and I picked it up on the way home.  Tuesday Frank and his friend Eric repaint the kitchen walls while I'm at work ... what a joy to come home to.  That's better! (sorry no photo yet)

Flip forward to this Saturday, I put Martha Stewart beadboard wallpaper up on one wall of the kitchen and now it feels like things are coming together.  We still aren't loving the kitchen cabinets, the White looks like chalk, we aren't sold.  Soooo, out come the swatch books and we look at the little inspiration piece from Behr that has our 2 blue wall colours in and there is a really creamy white called Swiss Coffee, I like coffee! Yep, that's what it needs!  Here is a one coat reveal of the Swiss Coffee with the new blue in the kitchen ...

This is just one coat and we are still considering some aging toner around the edges, of course the doors look much better when the knobs are on too.

Here's another look at the before (just for you KA) ...

What do you think so far?