Kitchen Wall Art Inspiration

I hope you had a wonderful weekend!  Mine was quiet, enjoyable and a little less productive than I had anticipated, but what can you do! 

After making and hanging up our calendar last week, I keep staring at the kitchen walls and wondering what else I can add to them.  Here are a few pinspirations I came across...

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Maybe a sign above our back door, in a different colour though.  Maybe yellow, nice, bright, sunny, cheerful...I like!

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Some framed utensils with interesting backdrops??

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Some of these free printables are super cute too....too many choices!

What kind of wall art do you have in your kitchen?

Get A Handle On It...

The last thing we had to do in the kitchen in order for us to move down and use it again was to put on the hardware.  At first I wanted something like brushed nickel to match the faucet and the future stainless appliances we'd get.  But then Darryl saw a few kitchens like these, with white cabinets like ours, but black hardware...

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We love the contrast they offer and I think it makes them become a bit more of a feature, as opposed to blending in with everything else.  So yes, *gasp* we are mixing our metals!  And we are very happy with it...

Here's Darryl's uber official way of ensuring that the handles were all put in at exactly the same spot per door...

I thought it was pretty clever myself - he's very resourceful.  I would have been measuring each door and it would have taken me much longer!

Here are the doors, sans handles...

And with...

(Question: we keep debating back and forth over whether or not we should put handles on the faux drawers under the sink....what are your thoughts?)

And the other side of the kitchen...

(I probably should have shown you the pictures of our kitchen before I showed you those professional ones because lord knows I am far from a good photographer.  I'm not sure why these turned out so grainy...I have a terrible case of just snapping away with my little camera without really considering what is in the frame, what the lighting is like, shadows...I'll work on it!)

The hardware isn't pure black, they're more of a blackish-bronze?

They feel really nice in your hands!  We like the simple profile they have, they kind of reflect the simple shaker-style cabinets we chose.

Next week I'll show you some full pictures of what our kitchen is looking like right now (which by no means I'll be sharing "after" shots because it's still in progress, lots and lots left to do, including a backsplash which is fun!)

What's your hardware up to these days?  Are you updating it, or have you already?  Do you love what you have?  How do you go about choosing your hardware?

Behind Every Door

After we had our countertops all on and gave them a few days to set, we got to putting the doors on the boxes.  Tres exciting!!  Ikea made it very easy for this step.  It was just a matter of unpacking the boxes, attaching the clips and then snapping them onto the cabinets.  Super easy.

So we quickly went from this (head's up these are so not glamourous pictures!)...



To this...

(not finished yet, boxes everywhere, no window trim, no hardware, but...one step closer!)

And from this...

To this...

We chose two upper cabinets with frosted glass doors because our main floor doesn't get a whole lot of natural sunlight, and we didn't want our kitchen to feel heavy and boxed in.  The glass door cabinets sit on either side of the kitchen window. 



We knew we would need a pantry to store things like canned and packaged foods, supplies like saran wrap and aluminum foil, paper towel....we're so glad we got this guy.

We also picked up Ikea's slow closers which are so good!  We are definitely feling spoiled.  At 7$ a pop we couldn't resist.  If you're thinking of slow closers, you can save some monies by putting only one closer one each door, as opposed to two (they are sold in a two-pack).  We have just one on each door and it's great.  I think if we had two on each door, the doors would just close too slowly . 

So next week I'll show you the hardware we ended up going with - and then I'll be able to show you fuller pictures of the kitchen, as opposed to close up shots of certain parts of the kitchen because I'm trying to hide the stuff I haven't revealed yet!)

Do you have new cabinet doors, do you prefer solid doors to glass ones?  Have you tried slow closers?

Countertops

One of the main things we had to take into consideration for our countertops was this pole-like support thing...

We knew we wanted to have a peninsula here, with an 8 inch overhang on the dining room side where we could add a couple of stools.  That meant that that part of the counter would be 8 inches deeper than a regular counter, which = a custom cut, which = more $. 

So we priced out a few different options and quickly realized that having even the simplest of custom cuts was increasing the price more than we cared too.  So we fell back to our go-to reaction...could we somehow do it oursevles?  It wasn't very complicated...But if we went the laminate route, we didn't want to have a seam if we could avoid it.  Then we considered buying a deeper laminate counter and cutting out what we wouldn't need, and avoid the seam issue altogether. 

We also had a cousin compare prices at Direct Buy, and the price was pretty close to what we ended up going with, but we didn't like any of their laminate options. 

So what did we end up going with???

 

IKEA pulls through again!  Here's why we ended up going this route:

 

1.  We like the natural look that it has

2.  We would be able to add the 8 inch overhang, sand it down and make it look seamless and custom cut, without having to pay extra for it

3.  We loved the combination of the white cabinets and wood countertops

 

We bought 3 of those counter tops (two 8 foot pieces and one 4 foot piece) and got to cutting.  I don't have too many pictures of the process, but for the most part it was just straight cuts and then the sink hole to cut out.

 

Then we sanded down the roughness

Then we drilled it into place from underneath and clamped it down over night...

and gave it a couple coats of food-safe sealer from IKEA (if you're ever going this route, make sure not to apply too much sealer at once or the counters feel tacky after...I've learned that one already...but the good thing about wood countertops is that any dings, stains and marks can be sanded down)

 







For the 8 inch hang over we first put a regular 8 foot counter on the cabinets and then, after much measuring, darryl cut the extension piece out of the 4 foot counter we bought.  We borrowed my dad's biscuit joiner kit because we didn't want any nails to be seen and biscuit joiners are all done in the middle of the wood, kind of like this...

 

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Once we cut all the holes, filled them with glue and inserted the biscuits into their adjoining holes, we clamped those suckers together good and tight for a secure fit and left them over night

 

 

 

The next day, we sanded the seam down so that only we know it's there.  Still on the to-do list is to buy some MDF to cover up the backs of the cabinets underneath the overhang and trim it out to make it look more built-in.

 

You can also see in the pic below on the left side of the counter, we cut the corner off. 

 

 

 

We did this for three reasons, first it gives the entry to the kitchen a few more inches of space...second, it maches the shape of that end cabinet of open shelves...and third, it perfectly mirrors the angled wall of the bathroom right across from it. 

 

This is the only picture that kind of shows the angled bathroom wall, I'll have to remember to take a better picture, but it's the wall on the left, it's not a 90 degree corner...

 

 

The black mark on the part we cut off are I guess burns from the blades, but it was easily sanded off.  That's all the pictures for today because the final counter pictures all have the cabinet doors on them, which I will share with you next week!

 

NOTE:  If you are buying these countertops, resist the urge to open the packaging on these until you are absolutely certain that you are ready to install them.  We made that mistake with one of them and in the August heat, it swelled and warped slightly.  Luckily we knew we'd have left overs and were able to not use the warped part, so it all worked out in the end.

 

I hope you have a great weekend, any plans???

 

Hanging Cabinets!

After the kitchen floors were installed and had time to set - and after a camping/cottage trip or two, as this was back in August - we were ready to start assembling our cabinets!

Oh wait, first I primed the walls up...

(the stack of boxes were our bamboo floors)

We bought our cabinets from IKEA during their kitchen event so that we received 15% back in gift cards (and bought an over the range microwave with it).  We loved the Adele White doors, and they were pleasantly one of the more economical choices too, so that made it an easy decision.  We had also gone to Home Depot to compare and their prices were quite a lot more money.  We had also seen in a flyer that they had $99 cabinets for any size, so we checked those out as well, but they were very basic and on the low end in terms of quality.  So we're really happy we went with IKEA.

No strangers to doing things ourselves thus far in our renovations, putting together 10+ cabinets was a money saving no-brainer for us (you can have IKEA people come and assemble and install them for an extra cost).  My job was to assemble all of the cabinets, so for a while my work station was a sea of cardboard packaging, tools and cabinet pieces...

...while Darryl was using a laser level to mark up the walls...

Soon we had some boxes put together and up on the walls...

That black plumbing pipe is what is running our temporary kitchen upstairs, but it will be removed, very soon I hope! The same goes for all of the wires, they too will be gone at some point.

It actually took us longer than we thought it would just to get all of the boxes hung.  So much time was spent measuring and levelling, which is all important, we just didn't realize how long it would take.

We didn't want to put the doors on the cabinet frames until we had installed the countertops, to avoid any dents and bangs.  We bought the countertop about a week or so after the cabinets bases as we were not yet sure what type of countertop we wanted - we knew granite was not an option for us, even though it is so gorgeous, we didn't want laminate but decided we still had to consider it and see what was out there and what prices they would be going for, or we could consider butcher block type counters...decisions, decisions! 

So I'll be back in a couple of days with a countertop post and then soon after that the cabinet doors! 

What kind of countertops do you have?  Are you happy with them or looking to upgrade? 

Kitchen Floors Revealed

Alright!  So after a little sneaky peaky yesterday I'm back to show you how the kitchen floors turned out.  With yesterday's disclaimer in mind, are these our dream floors?  No.  Do we love them anyways?  Absolutely!  Should we get a return on our investment?  We sure hope so!

We left off at the point where we were trying to decide on which way to lay the tiles...

We decided on the brick pattern for a couple of reasons...

1.  We just plain like it!

2.  It adds a little more (free) visual interest, rather than just laying them side by side (like the bottom 3 tiles in the first picture)

3.  We hoped that this pattern would trick the eye into seeing a slightly wider kitchen once the cabinets were installed (I'll explain further once I get the cabinet post up)

4.  Having straight grid-like grout lines makes it a lot easier for the eye to pick up on imperfections, as opposed to the brick pattern that breaks it up

Here we are laying the very first tile and being oh-so-happy about it!

Once Darryl had done a few rows (while my job was again to mix up the thinset so that he had an ongoing supply), we got into a nice rhythm.  Darryl would prepare the thinset on the floor and I would back-butter a bunch of tiles and lay them out for him so that he wouldn't be slowed down by having to do that as well. 



(we left the trickier cuts - the parts around the perimeter - until the end)

This has been, by far, the most back breaking work of this entire main floor project.  We were both dying by the end - our backs from bending over all day, our knees from kneeling, our necks from looking down for hours on end and Darryl's wrists from all the thinset spreading.  The pain!  We have definitely gained an exorbitant amount of respect for people who earn their livelihood from laying tile.  Whew!  

Once the tile was all set over the course of two 12 hour days and one 6 hour day, all that was left was to grout the tile.  I found that the grout we chose, turned out nothing like the sample and I was extremely frustrated.  Now I'm okay with it.  It's just grout, right?  It's not the main focus. 

(I realized I never took "after" shots!  So I took these pics this morning which is why you can only see part of the floor but once the kitchen is revealed next week you'll be able to see it all)



So this upgrade cost us all of $230!  It's crazy how much you can save when you're not paying for anyone else's labour.  We bought the tiles while they were on sale and they came to $181 (with a few boxes left over) and the rest of the cost was for the mesh, mortar, thinset, grout and sealer.  Woot!

ps.  Check out the updates, cover plates have been put on all the plugs and light switches!

Have you laid tile before?  If so, would you do it again?  Or is it a job you'd rather leave to the pros?



Kitchen Floors - Weighing the Options

I've been slacking on the kitchen updates, so here we go.  In August (a full year after we started demo) we tackled the new kitchen floors.  I have to put a bit of a disclaimer in here if we're being honest.  Darryl and I bought this house strictly as an investment and as a way to enter the housing market.  We know that this isn't our "forever" house.  We are both contracted employees desperately waiting for permanent positions, so we didn't have a lot of area to move in terms of mortgage approval.  For this reason, we bought a house in an "up and coming area", which translates to "pretty rough around the edges". 

With all of that in mind, we have been extremely aware of not "over-renovating" the house.  All those HGTV reno shows we're addicted to have taught us that, if nothing else.  We want to be sure to see the return on our investments, which means picking nothing in the high-end categories.  You know how they always say you don't want to have the best house on the street when it comes to resale (of course, you do if you're planning to stay long term though)?  So most of the finishings we chose are fairly basic because they bring the house a long way from where it was, but will still ensure we see a return when we sell. 

With that said, the kitchen floors...

Here's a reminder of what they used to be.  (They photograph much better than they were for some reason.  They were extremely cheap laminate that was poorly installed, chipped and beaten up)

I don't seem to have pictures of us taking up the kitchen floors - the laminate you see above was easy peasy to take up, but underneath were layers of vinyl and then a layer of 1/4 inch poplar underlay and then 3/4 inch tongue and groove pine subfloors.  If only there were a way to describe just how many nails we had to pull up.  No wonder I didn't take any pictures of the process, I didn't want to be reminded.

Needless to say, we lay a new subfloor which you can see in the picture below.  So in August, we decided to tackle the tile.  Something neither of us had done before but felt confident that we could attempt.  My job was to staple the metal mesh to the subfloor.  (If you're about to do this I suggest you wear more clothing than I did, that stuff is sharp!)

Hold your gasps of horror!  Yes, we know this isn't the most modern underlay (aka Ditra).  But it's the underlay that they've used for decades and decades.  It is way more labour intensive which is a big reason why it's not as popular as Ditra, but we weren't paying anyone for their labour and so we thought it would be worth it to suffer through it.  It is drastically cheaper than the orange stuff and, while it's not for everyone, with my disclaimer from the beginning it was right up our alley.

(Ditra)

I was sure to match each new piece of mesh up perfectly with the last to ensure that they were completely flush.  We couldn't have any variations in height or it would weaken the final product.  Same goes for the staples, I made sure they were all well sunk in the floor.

Once I was done my job, Darryl came in for his.  He laid a mortar/parge coat into the cement.

To make the process go faster, while Darryl was spreading the mix, I went outside and mixed up his next batch of mortar so that he could just keep moving along.

Once this part was all done, we had to leave it untouched, unwalked upon, for 24 hours.

The next day, we noticed the front entrance was still unlevel - it's hard to ask for perfect floors from a 91 year old house, so you can see the big circle area where Darryl added some more mixture the next day to better level it.



Another 24 hours later we started laying chalk lines as guides to be sure we were laying the tiles straight.  Then we fiddled with a few different ways of laying tiles (brick style, or just one beside the other, you can see the two different types below)

So there's a sneak-peak to the tiles, they're obviously a very basic ceramic tile, but they're neutral and miles better than they were.  We carried the tile into the main floor bathroom and into the front entrance as well.

Tomorrow I'll show you how it all turned out, which layout we chose and how much it all cost!

When you do renovations how do you pick your finishes?  Do you take into consideration whether it is your "forever house" and what is best for your return on investment?  Do you pick finishes that you love, regardless of the price tag?