Kitchen Post Number 37

You may remember that our kitchen started out yellow, and then we painted it brown, and then I tried to paint it green but no one would let me, so then I painted it white.  I said I liked it white, but deep down inside...I HATE WHITE WALLS!  There, I said it.  I couldn't stand the white.  So one day I went down in the basement and got what was left of our living room paint and slapped that up on the walls of the kitchen.

Now we finally have a color I can live with.

And our red chairs finally have a home!

Breakfast Nook Redo

Our kitchen's breakfast nook has seen a lot of changes.  Sometimes it looks like this:

Other times it looks like this:

Or this.  It was just too weirdly shaped for anything to stick permanently.  So I got the idea that I would tear out the pantry and build two smaller pantries on each side of this wall with a bench in the middle.  Add a table, and presto, breakfast nook.  I had a contractor come in and a $3,000 estimate later, I decided that was not gonna happen.  He did give me the idea, though, of doing a corner bench with a table.  He quoted that one for about $2,000.  I said, "Thanks for the free idea!" and went about doing it myself.

So here's what I came up with...and as usual, forgive the mediocre photography...if that's even what you want to call it.  The corner bench is actually three benches from Ikea, two with drawers, one without.  Since the kitchen is on the smaller side, storage was very important when
I was looking around for banquette seating.  These drawers are great and huge, and when I get tired of this setup, they can be used elsewhere easily.

I made the cushions and pillows myself, following this tutorial.  As mentioned before, I was trying NOT to spend $3,000 on this project, so I was dragging my feet about buying the foam for these cushions, which would have cost at least $60 with a coupon.  I looked around online a bit for alternative ideas, and I came across this great idea to use one of those egg carton foam bed cushions.  I happened to have one lying around, so I cut it apart, stacked it up, and voila! Free cushions.

The light was a $25 find at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.  I also got some drawer pulls when I was there for when I get around to working on the kitchen cabinets.  I made the shade in the background from some plastic blinds following this tutorial.  

I really wanted to have a dish towel on the front of the shade, and I found this one at Sur la Table for $8.

Bird.

I found the table for $65 using our neighborhood website.  It was originally that circa 1995 orangey oak that everybody has.  I decided to try my hand at restaining it, using this tutorial.  It worked pretty well except for a few things.  1. I decided to start staining the table in the middle of Typhoon June, so it took forever to dry.  2. It also took forever to dry because I did not do a good job of wiping off all the stain when I was staining it.  There are still a few goopy spots on the legs where the stain dripped and pooled together.  So I wouldn't recommend sitting on the legs in white pants for extended periods of time.  If you were planning on doing that.

The rug I got for $60 off of Joss & Main, which is kind of like Zulilly except for house stuff.  I was EXTREMELY impressed with the quality.  It's a really nice rug...that is now covered in little spots of stain...but still, high quality.

My Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs pictures have been in every one of our kitchens since our first apartment in Philadelphia.  The frames got a little spray paint face lift, and I took the prints to Kinko's and had them blown up to fit the frames a little better.  It only cost $1.60.

Yes, I have Scotch Guarded everything, and the covers come off and are machine washable.  Thank you for asking.  I will mention that when I was making the covers, I slipped one on to check the fit, and Lila climbed on top of it, stood up, and peed on it.  I was so pissed.  No pun intended.

Not too much has changed with the pantry that I hate.

I added a chalkboard to the inside of the door.

And I repapered the shelves because I think the old brown paper came with the house.  Like in 1957.

It's already been so nice to have a place to sit in the kitchen.  Lila likes walking around on the benches (Free-Range Parent here) and reading my macaron and cupcake cookbooks.  And so far she hasn't peed on it today, so one point for the breakfast nook.

Gecko Green

When we lived in Philadelphia, we owned a cute little row house with an open floor plan.  All the walls had to be painted the same color, so I went out on a preppy limb and chose Gecko Green.  Put a sample on the wall? Please, why would we do that.  We just looked at the paint chip and then went out and bought three gallons of the stuff.  As Johnny is painting it, he's loudly grumbling that I better like it since we just spent $140 on the paint.  Oops.  We stubbornly kept it and wore sunglasses inside.  My students loved it.  They said it reminded them of the Rainforest Cafe.  Classy.

Annnnnnyway, fast forward to Kansas a few years later, and we are now getting ready to do a DIY redo of the kitchen.  I'm planning to paint the cabinets white in a few weeks and put in a breakfast nook, and I've decided that I'm just not happy with the current color.  Enter Johnny's heart attack, stage right.

HG-TV Magazine had a picture of a room with the exact same wood paneling as ours where the designer used Asparagus Green by Olympic.  It just looked so cute with the white trim and brown furniture.  So the green on the right is Asparagus by Olympic.  The green on the left is Asparagus by Valspar that the Home Depot guy accidentally gave me.  Geeze.

I'm thinking with the white trim and white cabinets it could look really cute, but I don't want people to come over and be blinded.  Am I crazy?

Rainbow Bathroom Before and After

The woman who lived here before us, bless her heart, (see now that I said "Bless her heart," I can say whatever I want about her), really liked color.  Remember our kitchen?  Mmm neither do I.  Well in keeping with the idea of "as much color as possible everywhere," our upstairs bathroom was decked out in teal tile and rainbow wallpaper.  I don't mind the tile too much, but I have been wanting to change the walls since the second we moved in.  Two children later, I finally got around to doing it.

Rainbow Bathroom Before:

Rainbow Bathroom After:

Before:

Note where I got a little excited one day and started tearing off the wallpaper.  But after our hellish experience with stripping wallpaper in the living room and the dining room, we decided to just paint over it.  I spackled and sanded the seams, and it was much easier than stripping.

After:

Before:

After:

The main difference here is that I closed the curtain so that you can't see all the stuff hiding in the bathtub.

Before:

After: 

The prints are copies of old rowing prints that Johnny's Uncle Bob gave us for Christmas before we were married.  It's a good thing we got married so that I could keep the whole set.

And thanks to Becca Stam for the carving? stamp? print? I'm not sure what to call it, but she made these for her roomies when we graduated from Wheaton.  It's hung in all five of our homes.  I don't think we're going to move again.

Normally I would never paint a wall white, but I figured with the fabulously teal tile, that was all I should do.  I'm happy with how it turned out.  Especially since it's actually painted two different shades of white because Sherwin Williams gave me Pure White instead of Snowbound and I didn't realize it until I was done.  So if you come over, just smile and say it looks nice. 

Besides the tile, one of the fun retro things in this bathroom is the light.  If you look closely at the ceiling, though, you will see that the paint is peeling off of it, and if you look really closely under the peeling paint you will see that the CEILING USED TO BE PAINTED TEAL.  I'm sorry? Yes, pre-wallpaper, the ceiling and walls and tile used to all be teal.  I suppose I should have appreciated the rainbow wallpaper.

I'm very glad this project is over.  This is the first room that I have painted completely by myself, and I was getting tired of sitting in there every night.

Dining Room Chair Redo

If you have eaten a meal at our house recently, you most likely have noticed how disgusting our dining room chairs have become.

White seats + three little kids = bad idea.

So I decided that I wanted to reupholster the seats.  The various directions that I looked at online made it seem pretty easy, so I popped those puppies off of the chairs and started pulling out staples.

Underneath was a lovely pink number.

Johnny and I both agreed that we wanted plaid on the chairs, and I knew we needed something dark to combat Lila at dinner time, so I started looking around Etsy.  I found this great seller who had lots of choices, and I ended up ordering a couple yards of this red plaid.

So I was not aware, but recovering chairs is extremely easy and it only requires about two yards of fabric, so it's also a super cheap redo.  All you have to do is cut the fabric around the seat and staple it to the back.

Ta da! This seriously took less than two hours. Go do it right now.

Now I need to go buy some Scotch Guard like asap (Get it? Scotch Guard for the plaid seats? Ha. Get it?).

DIY Painted Bentwood Chairs

When Johnny and I got married, I had the good fortune of getting seven hand-me-down Bentwood chairs from my parents.  They were originally my grandmother's, and I asked her about them yesterday.  She said that she bought them from a pool hall in Oklahoma City for $2.50 a piece forever ago.  She brought them home and painted them apple green and put blue and white seats on them, tied in the back with big bows.  She said it was a "jolt" when you looked at them.  Nana couldn't remember the other colors that she had them painted, but there is evidence of that apple green, a Tiffany blue, and a bright red.  When my parents got them, my mom had them stripped down to their original wood, and we used them as kitchen chairs until I was in middle school.

Now for the present.  I noticed in a Crate and Barrel catalog awhile ago that they were selling painted Bentwood chairs for over $100 a pop.  A bright red one caught my eye, so I decided to repaint our chairs Ladybug Red by Martha Stewart.

First I sanded them down.  This really didn't take as long as I thought it would.

Then I primed them.  There are two issues here.  One: My grandpa said I should have used some kind of wood sealer before painting them to help the paint cover everything better.  Oops.  Two: I should have been less sloppy with my primer and actually tried to cover all the wood.  Oops.  You'll notice that one seat isn't painted.  It splintered awhile ago, so I'm waiting for my grandpa to cut me a new circle and attach it.

Now, I wouldn't normally use a Martha Stewart color, and I certainly wouldn't use Behr paint from Home Depot.  We're a Sherwin Williams family, you see.  But Sherwin Williams doesn't have shopping carts that you can strap very independent "I walk by myself!" kids into, so we had to go to Home Depot.  This picture is after one coat...and I stopped taking pictures after that because I did something like five coats.  Honestly, they still need one or two more coats, but I got bored.  

And here's the somewhat finished product!  

The cushions were grey cushions that I bought awhile ago at Ikea (circular cushions are very difficult to find).  I got some fabric from Hobby Lobby for 40% off and recovered the cushions the same way you would cover a pillow.

While I was sewing the cushion covers together, I stuck in some apple green ribbon to tie the cushions to the chairs.

I severely underestimated the amount of ribbon I would need for each chair, and now I have to go back to Hobby Lobby to get enough for the last three.  "Story of my life," said Nana when I told her.

Anyway, I'm really happy with them.  Overall I spent less then $100 on supplies, so that's seven chairs for the price of one!  And here's a little known fact about Bentwood chairs: My sister said that they were the first mass produced chair in the United States.  So there you go.

From Eat In to Play In

We've had a bit of a space problem in the kitchen lately.  The kitchen table seems to spend more time taking up space and getting kids stuck under it than it does actually holding food.  Since the majority of our time is spent in here, I told Johnny to move the table out.

Before:



After:

I got the rug from Costco.

Notice Lila's birthday decorations are still up.

Please don't notice the crayon marks all over the tile.

One reason we bought this house over other ones is that we could have a kitchen table in the kitchen.  I guess the things we think we need aren't always necessary.  Though I am glad I stuck to my guns about having a bathtub...and a washer and dryer.  Don't take those things for granted, suburban people.