Kitchen tour November 2013

Time to do a little kitchen comparison 

Here we were March 2012 looking in from the living room.  Its actually super hard to get a good pic from this angle because of all the light from the windows… makes the colour of the walls look way different than they really are… everything looks so yellow but you can get the jist of what is going on

Here we are November 2013 from the same angle (roughly) with again, bad lighting.  Biggest differences are the door we painted red (Benjamin Moore Geranium, same as front door), hung some curtains to the right there and kinda hard to notice but there is some subway tile back splash that is awesome.  Also painted that dresser you see on the right hand side which is awesome for storage. Added a rug under the kitchen table which has really helped prevent damage to the floor along with adding a bit of coziness.

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I'm trying to think of what to do over the window in the kitchen sink.  Maybe a valance with matching fabric like this… or a shelf something like this… we'll see

                                       

Here's what used to be our coffee corner but it was actually a bit small for our coffee pot so now we just keep our mugs here and use it for wine and the cookie jar:)  We've talked about one day extending the counter out a bit farther so it would fit our coffee pot better.  In hindsight we should have just extended it out from the beginning… still love this little corner.  Nels just finished the back splash here about a month ago.

Here's a bit of a close up of our curtains.  We just finished them last weekend.  I had my first ever experience ordering fabric through fabric.com and it was AWESOME.  I had the fabric shipped to a warehouse at the Sumas border (free shipping) and then my international shipping connections (mom and lori) picked it up for me.  I will definitely be shipping more stuff this way because its so much cheaper and so convenient if someone can pick it up for you.  I ended up doing no-sew curtains after I got into a fight with my sewing machine so we'll see how long they last.  If the iron-on hem does crap out on me I always have the option so sew them because they're cut to size and there is enough fabric for a seam allowance.

Here we are looking from the corner to the living room.  We need some new bar stools at some point… we could easily have 4 around the island but they're too pricey and not really a necessity right now.

 Looking in from the mud room to the kitchen.

and from the mudroom to the other side of the kitchen

 Close up of our painted dresser.  I really love the idea of using furniture in unconventional ways… like this dresser that is obviously supposed to be in a bedroom but is perfect for storing napkins and wrapping paper and craft supplies.  Also shutters for fun even though they don't serve a practical purpose.

Molly's little desk area… I was looking for a way to add tangerine into our kitchen and I love that I was able to in a non permanent way.  If I get sick of this colour I'll just move the table out or paint it another colour :)

This was the Panatone colour of the year for 2012… Tangerine Tango.  I had the colour matched at Benjamin Moore.

Of course our herringbone stencil that we did a few weeks back… I'm still in love with it.

We currently use this bench for some seating.  I love benches because they're a great way to seat more people and this one came from Nels' parents.  I might eventually paint it but for now its been great.

 enough pictures yet????
 nope!!

LOVE the subway tile!!

There you have it. The kitchen as it sits right now.  Maybe we'll leave it alone for awhile now. Its ended up being much more eclectic than I first thought it would be.  In my head I wanted it to be super white and calm.  As we lived in the house for longer and longer that just seemed kinda boring and actually Nels is the one who really wanted me to add some colour so the red door, blue dresser and orange desk for Molly have helped make the room more fun.

Stencilled Herringbone Wall

I've had quite an obsession with the herringbone pattern for awhile now and I had been wanting to do something with this wall in our kitchen for a long time.

One random Wednesday afternoon I threw it out there to Nels and we pulled out the painters tape and magic happened.

I had been looking around at different stencil companies and I had actually decided I was just going to bite the bullet and buy one but the whole idea of stencilling kinda scares me.  How do you keep that stencil straight on the wall?  Doesn't paint get everywhere??  And most importantly I did not want to pay for a stencil plus any other extra supplies I might have needed.  I still LOVE the results of stencilling I see online but I'm not convinced I could do it.

Nels thought he could easily tape off the wall... so he taped the whole thing off for me. we used this tutorial on pinterest for a reference and it was GREAT!!  I wanted a bit of a different pattern so when it came down to painting I just alternated the white colour a bit differently

We used Benjamin Moore Cloud White paint that we have for painting our trim and the original wall colour is Hawthorne yellow (also Benjamin Moore).  Best part is in total this project cost us $8.20  and that's cause we ran out of tape so I ran to the hardware store in town to get some.  I LOVE a quick painting project that has major impact.

Our kitchen is my favourite room in the house so we do like to play around with decorating it a bit.  We put the most money and by far the most time into fun projects for this room.  Next up we are going to paint the door that leads to the deck red and I have some fabric ordered to sew some curtains… we'll see how that goes.

Working on a house tour: Living Room

So I have yet to do any sort of updates in the form of a house tour mainly because I can't manage to keep the house clean enough to take pics:)

Needless to say I am really trying to get some pics taken so that I can share what we've been doing and more importantly what we dream of doing in each room.

I managed to get a few photos taken of the living room the other day that I wanted to share.  Not much has changed in here but we have some ideas that I'm super excited about.

One of my favourite views in the house is looking out from our office to the living room.  You can get a glimpse of the kitchen and the openness to upstairs.  I spent so much time standing in this spot dreaming about how to decorate these spaces while we were building and I still like to stand here and look at what we've done and what we could do.  The most obvious thing that needs to be done to me is the trim around all the railings.  Trim just finishes everything off so well so I'm excited to get painting so that so Nels can put it up.  

I am still very much in love with the armoire we got off of kijiji (love that it hides our TV) and recently we put that old phone on display which I'm loving.  I'm possible going to spray paint that lamp gold so if I do I'll post a pic.

I've never loved these boxy things.  When we originally moved in, the empty space by the fireplace just bugged me so much that I put them up.  Well, they've never come down but thanks to some leftover paint from our front door and some scrap-book paper I was able to make them a little more "me".  Still not in love but a bit better.  

Here's a look from the front door into the living room.  Our curtains are from Ikea and I talked about them here.  Mainly chosen because you cannot beat the price but at the end of the day I do really like the print.  I would love to add a bright patterned area rug like the one in this pic one day but I cannot believe the price of large area rugs.  I can't help but notice that our couch looks purple in this pic... IT'S NOT!!  I swear its just a nice grey colour:)

 Here's the look from the kitchen to the living room. That door you see is the master bedroom and to the left of it is the front door (not pictured).

We would LOVE to do built ins something like this on that large wall with the four white frames and little black shelves

The built ins would likely stretch from our bedroom door to the office doors (far right).  We're thinking of doing an Ikea hack with Billy Bookcases but we'll see.  Might not happen this winter (because we have a fairly major project that needs to get done)... but maybe next winter:  

If for some reason we don't think built ins will work we will probably do wainscoting along the bottom of that big wall and extend it to the front entrance to look something like this

We would also ADORE a sectional for this space something like this.  Right now I'm totally fine with our couch.  I actually kind of love it.  We had it custom made from a place in Calgary right after we got married so its a bit longer than the average couch (so Nels can lay down on it).  Our two faux leather chairs were also a steal.  We bought them for 60.00 each at Home Depot a few years ago.  Our blue coffee table is something I found in Dad's shed and painted Benjamin Moore Blue Nose awhile back.  This winter my goal is to antique it to look something like this and seal it really well because that's one step I've skipped in way too many of my painting projects:(  I'm a rookie at painting furniture.  

So as of October 2013 this is our living room.  We have some major trim painting/putting up planned for this week so I'm excited.  

i joined the turquoise bandwagon

I think i've mentioned before that I've always been a little bit weary of blue.  Don't know why, but I always lean towards greens and yellows for my favourite decorating colours.

My appreciation for blue started when I painted our coffee table Benjamin Moore "Blue Nose" as i posted here.  Of course I've also noticed the huge turquoise trend in decorating right now so I had to have a part of this blue pie.  It also doesn't hurt that I love yellow and turquoise together so it naturally fits in a few places in the house.

I picked up a few bottles of spray paint from Home depot a few weeks ago.  I've been looking for the perfect yellow spray paint for awhile so after this post on Young House Love,  I was stoked to check it out.  Home depot has a REALLY good selection so along with the yellow I picked up a green and turquoise colour.

This mirror had been 3 different colours now but I think this turquoise is here to stay.    The actual colour is aqua in the Rustoleum brand.

These little buckets are plastic and they were 3.00 at superstore.  I LOVE all the turquoise and yellow at superstore right now.

Yah for turquoise!   I've done a few things with the green and yellow paint as well that I'll post about later.

It's done....ish

Our back entrance is VERY functional as of today so I thought it was time to track our progress and maybe even shift our focus to another room now that this room makes me smile when I walk into it.

Here's our sink that Nels installed which is AWESOME especially for cleaning up paint brushes etc...  I spray painted that mirror today... there's a sketchy pic of what this mirror looked like along with the rest of the room here.

 Here's my favourite corner... I LOVE the hooks and the panelling.  Even the cat food looks much better in a bin than in the bag on the floor:)

We're hoping to put a bench under the hooks perhaps or at least get a shoe rack to keep everything organized

I added this frame today with an old key in it... love keys.  We got this key from the pottery store outside of Harrison

I love the way these prints turned out as well:)

Of course Molly needs her own little hooks so we put these ones up for her

She loves them:)  These hooks are from Ikea... we bought them a long time ago but never got around to putting them up.  

back entrance progress...

Alrighty, so here is how the back entrance is shaping up:

(I would like to preface this round of pics by saying that it is REALLY hard to take pics in this room because there's so many windows so during the day there's always a glare and at night the lights make everything look yellowy)

Here's the tile all grouted and some of the baseboards going up

The boys putting the trim around the windows and measuring/cutting boards for the bottom half of the wall

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Here's the first vertical board going up on the wall

One wall done!

Even though the colour is wonky, you can get the gist of what's going on in this pic

There's the back door and the wall that will be painted and have hooks on it

Back door... to the right is the washer and dryer, to the left is the hook wall

It might be blurry, but here's an action shot of the painting getting started.  2 coats down.  Now we've been dapping and sanding and we'll do a final coat tomorrow.  So excited!!

 And then because I couldn't help myself and because Nelson and I are all sentimental about our house I bought him these two prints from here for his birthday... LOVE THEM and can't wait to see how they look in the room

Back entrance is looking saweeeet!!

So I don't have the pics ready yet but our back entrance is looking AWESOME!!  The floor is finished... the boards are mostly up for the wainscoting and I'm going to be painting today.  So stoked!!!  Now I'm searching out some art, hooks and other things to put in the room.

On another note we visited the Red Deer home show yesterday and it was fun fun fun.  We ran into the sales guy from Nelson homes who sold us our package... we're so happy with the company and would go with them again in a heartbeat:)

I also stopped by the Watkins booth because I love Watkins... their packaging is AMAZING I don't even really care what the product does (even though its good product too).  Also, they had the cutest lady ever named June selling their stuff... oh my goodness how can you not buy from a cute lady named June selling Watkins?!?!?

I got the grapefruit scented all purpose cleaner to add to my tub and tile cleaner... it smells awesome!  I should have bought some lotion as well because I just want to spray this on myself.  Oh, and they have a baby line!!  June almost convinced me to start selling myself!