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!

Changing Pad Liners

We bought these changing pad liners.  Pack of 3 - terry cloth with a plastic-y back liner.

Put them in the wash.  

Then the dryer.  

Then read the cleaning instructions. 

Line Dry 

Great.

So we used them for months before I finally decided to rip the ruined plastic lining off and make them better.

First - take off vinyl edging.

This is the most of something like this that I've thrown out in a long time.  

Definitely not going to use that. EVER.

I cut the terry cloth so it was a little more rectangular.  Cut some fleece (waterproof to catch the "spills") I had picked up from the remnant bin a long time ago (and happened to be the perfect width for this.)

Pinned with right sides facing.  You know the deal.

I used this stitch.  I have no idea what it's really for but it seemed to work pretty well for this project.  Thought I'd mix things up since this is the one of my nine stitches that I hadn't used.

Finished it off by top stitching.

Not fantastic, but it works.  

And the fleece keeps us from having to change the pad cover every other day.

A sub-par product saved by a little creative thinking :)

Ta-da!!

Jersey Fix

Have you ever finished a project and been so impressed with yourself (because you weren't sure how it was going to turn out) that you felt like you deserved a prize or something?

I had that feeling today.

Rewind back to Christmas when I gave my hubby a Capitals Jersey for Christmas.  Well, because I have a hard time paying over $200 for a piece of clothing, I went the cheaper route and got an "authentic" jersey from a discount supplier. 

Well....hubby was excited but after the excitement wore off he began analyzing every aspect of the jersey and decided there were some sewing errors that he just couldn't live with.  Long story short, we couldn't return it so it was up to me to fix it or he wasn't going to wear it.

Problems that needed fixing...(according to hubby)

1.  The name on the back was sewn on crooked.

2.  One of the numbers on the sleeves was sewn on crooked.

3.  The Capitals eagle logos on the shoulders were sewn on crooked.

So hubby found my seam ripper and took all those things off.  Great.

The shoulder logos were pretty poor quality and didn't quite make it through hubby's seam ripping adventure.  New, sewn appliques were ordered.

I have never appliqued anything so I was a little intimidated, but I'm not one to turn down a sewing challenge especially if it meant making hubby happy.

With hubs looking over my shoulder I got to work.  

Turned out great!  

And T is very happy with the results.

And so am I!!!   I can't believe how well the patches turned out!  I was really worried.

 I really felt like I should reward myself.

WHEW!! Just in time for it to be worn to tomorrow's game.