Sunday, June 19, 2011

So I convinced my friend Meg to come paint (most of) my trim white a few weeks ago.  Meg works for manicotti or stuffed shells.  I highly recommend getting a Meg of your own.  You may not have mine.

The house trim was painted a dark brown color when we moved in.  Turkish Coffee, which I believe is  a Sherwin Williams color.  It's a very pretty brown, kind of dark cherry stain looking but the dark trim kinda brought the house down and I wanted to lighten things up a bit.

I'm still not done, but I have a before and after of the window trim.
Before

After  
Someday I will learn how to operate a camera indoors.  In any case, here are some shots of my stained glass window with brown and with white trim.  (This is on the wall that's coming out at some point, as it's covered in plastic faux brick.  Oh the 1970s.  You were a bad time for stuff like this.) 

I'm pretty happy with it so far.

Also, for some reason, we let these birds nest and hatch some eggs on our porch.
ohai
I have no idea why, but I think they are all gone now. What am I supposed to do with the nest?  I haven't seen any more birds in a few weeks. 

Knock it down with a broom handle and clean the brick up there?  Contact wildlife safety or something?  No idea.

At present, the plan is "ignore for a while and hope husband fixes this at some point".

But not today.  It's Father's Day, ya'll.  Happy Father's day to all the daddy's. 
Read more >>

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

White Appliances!

The Kitchn has an article about white kitchen appliances!
We specifically chose white for our kitchen for a variety of reasons:

  1. They are cheaper.  Seriously, for consumer grade stuff, stainless costs more for no added functionality.  (This is not the same if you are buying fancy pro or prosumer appliances.  Those are basically all stainless.)
  2. I wanted to lighten up the dark cabinets.  We have a lot of dark in the kitchen.  White seemed like a nice choice to balance that out.
  3. White appliances don't date all that quickly and I'm cheap.  I don't want to replace my appliances if I don't have to, and I do fear that stainless will be the harvest gold of the 2000-2020 time period someday.  I could totally be wrong, but really, white is nice and neutral, so even if I am, I don't really think it matters.  White appliances are not much of a gamble.
I'm not loving the stove but it's really black & white and not plain white.
To be fair, I liked my stainless appliances from our old house just fine, though they did have a layer of dog snot at snout high basically all the time.  That was a much lighter kitchen, however.

I am loving the retro and vintage stoves in that The Kitchn post.  Very cute!  I can feel myself gravitating towards a white viking range, though.  Man, those are pretty.  The one here has mirrors for a backsplash so you can see behind you.  Brilliant!

Read more >>

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Backsplash Woes

Hey, do you guys remember the backsplash I was going to use?
like, as an accent not 100% squirrels

So I still do not have a backsplash. Just drywall and white paint, which is perfectly cromulent, but not super pretty.  The squirrel tiles are not going to work for a variety of reasons.  I'm not sold on the Moroccan tile, either.

I was thinking that I might like something like this.

I think it would look fab with the white/beige/brown countertops and the cherry cabinets.  However, even though it's relatively inexpensive at $10 a square foot, I have right around 80 square feet of space to tile and we're building a deck.  ~$1k for materials is prolly not in the budget for a few months.  Plus, if I had a grand to blow, I would probably buy a new stove. 

So, instead, check out this house that The Style Files showed this week.
The rest of the house is similarly pretty.

I totally love this!  I bet I could do it with similarly $10 a foot tile with only a few and some plywood for like ~$70.  

In other news, the deck continues to progress slowly.  My laziness has prevented me from taking actual photographs.  I'm sorry.  I'm a crappy blogger.
Read more >>

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Pinterest! Arrrrrrrr....

I have jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon.  And how could I not?  It is *full* of awesome.



Apparently, it's more collaborative than me just pinning stuff I like, so I created a board about the pirate themed powder room I am hoping to create in the space formerly occupied by the original kitchen.
http://pinterest.com/thwomp/pirate-bathroom/

Check it out!  Pin some pirate themed stuff, mateys!  Let's see how this collaborative board thing is supposed to work.
Read more >>

Outdoor Kitchen

The Kitchn blog has this awesome post about how to build your own outdoor kitchen.


It's secretly a link to this PDF: http://www.studiomama.com/instructions/sm_outdoorkitchen.pdf


I totally love this!  I can just see myself outside chopping and rinsing.  Once upon a time, we had an "Outdoor Kitchen" grill that I bought for Jeff for his college graduation, but that ultimately disintegrated over the five years that we had it.

Up next for our foursquare is the back deck.  It has decking!  It has a platform for stairs!  It's coming soon to a suburban residence near you!  Hopefully, we'll have it in the next two or three weeks.

It has been EPICALLY hot here.  I realize that folks from the south are now laughing at my definition of 95 degrees as epically hot.  We're in Pennsylvania.  Hot.  Plus, we had to move the AC unit to build the new kitchen addition, and have not replaced it yet.  Hopefully, a new AC unit is coming soon to a suburb near me.

Happy June, folks!
Read more >>