Play Kitchen

For Christmas this year, we wanted to give our little girl a big present and I really wanted it to be something we made.  She loves pulling stuff our of the one kitchen cabinet that is purposely not baby-locked, so why not give her her own little kitchen!

After a LOT of searching Pinterest for ideas, I was determined that I was going to find a night stand or end table of some sort at a thrift store or off Craig's list that we would then transform.  My husband was determined to convince me that we should pay way too much for any number of adorable play kitchens.

So I spent a Saturday afternoon going to THREE thrift stores (with little girl in tow) and found something I thought would work.  So $15 later I brought home an end table and a plan.  It took a little creative convincing to get my husband to see my vision. Once he realized he'd get to use several power tools, he was in.

Here's the process (minus a few steps) in pictures.

All of the painting, stove front making and details happened at night and I completely forgot to take pictures of everything between the above picture and the finished kitchen.

Ikea has the most adorable pots and pans set

And kitchen utensil set

Some cut up kitchen twine makes pretty awesome spaghetti - and let me tell you, she LOVES 'making' spaghetti!

Hubby went a little crazy with the Ikea fruit and veggie baskets too.

Cutting fruit is a bit hit too.

It took her a few minutes to realize this was sitting in our rather small living room (which was made even smaller with the Christmas tree) but she eventually warmed up to it and has played with it every day since.

Kitchen Updates: Part 2

Well here it is! We finally did stuff to our kitchen that makes us want to be in there!

First, look at what it used to look like. Cranberry stipe and all.

Can't forget our favorite the most hideous part - the HOLE!!

Well, it took the contractors just a day and a half to ripe out all the dry wall from the ceiling, install new drywall, add more insulation to the ceiling and install 4 - 5" recessed lights.  The best part is they are now on a dimmer!  No more being blinded when coming down in the morning while it's still dark.  No more glaring bright light late at night. Love me some dimmer switch!

Ahh! Soo much nicer!  Bye, bye ugly stucco ceiling!  We DON'T miss you at all!  In fact, we now wish we could replace all of the ceilings in our house with smooth drywall.  Not likely though.

And did you notice we painted the walls too?  Yup! We figured, the ceiling looks so good with fresh paint, why not finally pick a wall color and get to it! We finally settled on Benjamin Moore: Pale Sea Mist.  We know we eventually want the cabinets to go white and we think this will look really nice with crisp white cabinets.   We also finally hung up the three wall trivets we received as a house warming gift over 2 years ago.  I was waiting until our walls were no longer white to hang them so they could actually be seen.

We went ahead and painted the cranberry shelves white also with standard white trim paint we already had.  Oh and remember that cranberry stripe we painted above the cabinets in a bizarre moment of "hey, wouldn't that look good"?  The contractors primed over it for us when the redid the ceiling drywall.  An unexpected bonus! Meant zero priming for us to do!

I probably shouldn't be showing picture of the kitchen when the counters are a mess.  Hello lazy Saturday afternoon!

The fresh paint on the walls makes us hate the dark cabinets even more.  Cabinet painting might commence sooner rather than later.

The only part we don't like about our new lights is that they are not as bright as we would like.  Not sure if it was miscommunication with the contractor or what, but it's much darker on the counters than we would like.  We had planned on installing under the cabinet lights also, so we're going to take care of that then decided if we want a few more recessed lights in the ceiling.  We shall see.  In the mean time, we like that our kitchen feels a little closer to being a nice room that we want to spend time in.

Kitchen Updates: Part 1

One of my current favorite blogs is Young House Love.  Have you been there?  If you haven't, get there fast and be prepared to hang out for a while.  You'll LOVE it!

I think the thing I love most is that they are not only about the same age as me and my husband, they have a daughter just about the same age as mine, and their passion for DYI on the cheep is incredibly inspiring!  Ok, that's more than one thing.  (I really want to be their friend....maybe a little too much.  I mean they live only a state away from me!)  Their posts on their projects are SO detailed, they make everything look easy to accomplish if you follow the right steps.

This might be my favorite transformation they've done:

Before

After

Their current kitchen remodel has me and my husband itching to get the ball rolling on ours (without spending an arm and a leg and our next child to do it.)  I'm secretly anxiously awaiting every new blog post they share on their progress.  Take a look at what they're doing:

In progress...

I mean, HELLO!?! What a difference!

I'm hoping my husband and I can do at least half as nice a job on ours.

I love a good before and after shot, so here we go.  

Our kitchen, built circa 1980.

Our projected updates:

- We HATE the cabinets.  Those are definitely getting painted some shade of white. We think some shiny new hardware will make it that much nicer too. We'll be following YHL's step by step on how to do this with the best results.

- Update the lighting with recessed lights. You can see how glaring the fluorescent light is in the picture 

below.

- New ceiling. More on that below. We HATE the stucco ceilings we have throughout the house and are super excited that at least one room will be rid of them.

What's staying:

- We don't love the black appliances (came with the house), but they are in good condition and they match, so they're staying.

- We also don't love the counter tops, but they are in good condition (for laminate).  If we can find a good deal, we may change those too.

We painted that cranberry color around the top one night after hubby painted some shelves and we had one of those "we-have-left-over-paint-and-want-to-paint-something-else-and-it-might-look-nice" moments.  We liked it for a couple days. We don't love it anymore.

 And this is our least favorite part of the kitchen; The nasty hole in the ceiling above the refrigerator.  We actually made that hole ourselves, but it was necessary when we noticed water dripping from the ceiling after a HUGE snowstorm 2 years ago. (Yes, that has been there for WAY too long.) Short story: we had an ice dam on the roof. With the ceiling panel sagging because it was completely saturated, our best option was to cut a hole in the drywall to let the water drain.  It turned out to be a good option, because 5-6 gallons of water drained out.  Better that than the whole ceiling caving in.

Lovely isn't it? We lived with that hideous hole for WAY to long. Like 2 years long.

This is the eat-in area of the kitchen. We spend a lot of time here. It's usually not that empty, but we had already started emptying the room for the contractors to come redo the ceiling. And those are the cranberry shelves that prompted the paint above the cabinets.

So we hired a contractor who ripped out the entire ceiling (Hallelujah!!), installed 4 - 5" recessed lights, and primed the ceiling.  We're looking to save as much money as possible, so we opted to paint the ceiling ourselves.  We want to repaint other ceilings in our house so we didn't mind buying ceiling paint and doing it ourselves.

Next post will show you our lovely new ceiling (we really love it! maybe a little too much) and what else we did once we got the rollers out to paint the ceiling!