Anie's Space

Shortly after we moved in (within a year or so) my family came down to help move the wall in the kitchen.  It was so bizarre. There was this 5'x6' area in the garage that could have (should have) been in the kitchen!  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the progress because the device my pictures were on was stolen, but here are some before and after pictures.  Not only did we move the wall, I replaced the solid door with one that had a window in it, so that the evening sunshine that flooded my garage would shine into the kitchen!   See that wall to the left of the stove? All this space! See how small the kitchen was?  To the right of the fridge is the washer and dryer.   Here's an of after shot (several years later).  On the ceiling you can see where the wall was.  It made such a difference!  My mom and I found a couple of "broken" cabinets at Home Depot, and we fixed those and added a door on top for a few years and later I found a countertop that mat

  This is what our kitchen looked like when we first bought our home.  That was the brightest yellow I had ever seen, and paired with the high gloss, cherry wood, polyurethane cabinets, it was rather shocking to the system! I took a pendaflex from Sherwin Williams and any time I found something I liked the colors on, I looked to see what colors of paint matched it.  It's funny, but I found an iridescent placemat that had several coral colors in it, and that is how I made my final color choices.  Coral, Salmon & Foxy.  I did things a little different than most folks, and painted all the walls Salmon, except for most of the southern walls, which I painted Coral, which was just a shade lighter.  Folks often don't even notice, but it's a fun little thing to do. This is what the kitchen looked like after a good paint job.  Now the cabinets don't jump out at you and the colors are much more soothing.  If you notice the wall on this side of the bar, it's the lighter co

After the initial painting of the kitchen I knew that I wanted the cabinets painted but it took a few years before I was blessed to have my mom come to town and help me get that giant project done. To start, we took all the doors off (make sure you tag each one so that you know where they came from!) and we removed all the hardware. There are lots of posts out there that give you step by step instructions on painting you kitchen cabinets.     I'm not going to do that here.   I will however, tell you that there is a LOT of sanding involved, especially if someone was kind enough to coat your oak cabinets in a high gloss cherry Polyurethane!!  Can you see why I hated them so much?  You can't see the gloss, but you can sure see how uneven the finish was. The cabinet boxes were the easy part.  The hard part was the doors.  All those little groves and the two levels made it difficult to sand and to paint. We used plastic sheeting (stapled it to the horrible c

One of the first things we did when we bought our house was to paint the fireplace. Here's what it looked like when we first looked at the place. We later learned that others we knew had looked at it too but couldn't get past the fire-engine red fireplace.   Thankfully, my mom, sister, and I were able to provide the proper treatment and give it a new life.  After priming it we painted it the dark color, then used a "dry roller" with the medium color and then sponged/ ragged, a third lighter color and a little brown.  It gave it a more dimensional look, more like real brick.   See the difference between the top half and the lower half!  It's starting to look like real bricks again. We later learned that the mantle was removeable.  I recommend that you always check that first.  It sure would have saved us a lot of time and effort. Here we are adding the final colors, ragging on a  few different colors, one at a time.