My Dirty Little Secret

As my hubby will attest, cleaning is by no means a favorite pastime of mine.  While I may not love taking the time to clean, I do love a clean house.

Ever since we moved into the house ( almost 3 years ago!) there's been something that has bugged me every.single.frigging.day. 

The little line of black-end silicone caulk behind our kitchen sink- eeeww and aaarrg!   But, the other weekend I finally realized that it wasn't going to change on it's own, and decided to roll up my sleeves and tackle this silly little task on the house to do list...

So, I gathered my weapons of destruction (caulk, exact-o knife, and a random weird flat pointy tool I found in our workshop :)  ), and attacked the old caulk. 

In no time flat (okay maybe 15 minutes-ish) I had it all cleaned out and a new fresh line of bathroom and kitchen caulk in it's place.

And now, every day I do the dishes I've got my happy face on like the little bronze Buddha on our window sill... it's the little things sometimes :)

Since a little before and after never hurts....

Ahhhh, so much fresher and cleaner.  Now, the real question is why the heck did it take me so long!

Accentute what you've got

Now that we have been bathing in the completed project afterglow for a while, H and I are starting to discuss the next batch of changes to our house.   One of which is a cosmetic face lift to our kitchen.  While we were lucky to have inherited a great space, we have a grand "one day" plan of blowing out a wall or two to make a huge open plan space, but as the kitchen is in pretty good condition, we are not about to pull the trigger on that expensive reno any time soon.  But, there are some things that we think are missing in this space to make it really work for us that we can do in the interim, such as ...

ME: 

• More and Improved storage including some open shelving to display said nice dishware
• Hello, I married a chef for better (amazing home cooked meals) and for worse (his love/need to have a dish and glassware for every occasion)... so we have large quantities of kitchen goods that desperately need corralling.
• To replace the "stupid" random lone upper cabinet currently suspended off center on one of the walls of our kitchen, taking up valuable storage real estate. 

HE: 

• A corner banquette for additional seating
• A fun accent wall in a mod pattern

So, like any modern day DIY and design enthusiast, I've been gathering inspiration pinning ideas for this future project (if you want to check out all my pins, I'm "craftywaffles")

For this space, I'm envisioning a cosy corner banquette with  storage underneath for party dishes and other infrequently used items, paired with a tulip style round table, and a pair of fun chairs taking advantage of our corner with a window, next to our back door, something like this

from here

 

I'm thinking that H's requested "groovy" accent wall will go on the left wall from floor to ceiling, but I've been having trouble finding wallpaper that work's with our kitchens colours (seafoam green counters, yellow walls, and off white cabinets all of which are staying for now).

 

This wallpaper isn't super retro, but the colour and geometric pattern speaks to me.

 

from here

 

I also saw this paint able option which means we can totally customize the colour to suite our room, but the pattern may be a bit too ..... expected/traditional  modern retro ?

 

from here





The thought of stencilling has also crossed my mind as again we can customize the colour and the pattern to suit our space, and this one caught my eye - maybe the perfect blend of retro and contemporary?



from here

Whatever we choose, I want to add a series of simple modern floating shelves (probably from the Swedes) over part of the accent wall to display a bunch of our pretty bowls glasses and accessories.

from here

So there you have it, a sneak peek at our early stages of the kitchen beautification project.

This Little Light of Mine

With our basement done, and the upstairs projects underway, we my dear sweet handy father finally got around to poking me with a big stick and we got a simple item crossed off the list that had been annoying the heck out of me since the dawn of time since we moved in ....... changing out our kitchen light(s).

With the purchase of our house we inherited two bleh light fixtures.  Although we were thankful that they worked (yup, there's a silver lining for ya), they in no way 'went' together in any stretch of the imagination.   My least favourite, was what I dubbed the "spaceship light" in the main kitchen area... the large rectangular fluorescent light by the sink- ugg!

Followed closely by it's neighbour the "Roman Special" the forest green faux aged copper wanna be over the eating area!

Note: you can tell my immense love for these fixtures since the only pics I can find are from our home inspection day 1.5 yrs ago!)

Months and months ago, I scored a great large (14" diam) retro-clean lined-tastic opaque glass globe light from our local Restore for a whopping $7.50- win!  But instead of doing anything with it, it languished in the black hole (aka the bookcase area of our hallway).  To be honest I'm totally amazed the darn thing survived considering the lack of care we took with it.

The other night during one of their visits to see us help us on our never-ending to do list, my Dad and I decided to just get 'er done (notice a new trend around here?  Less procrastinating/thinking and more doing, I love it, but I'm not sure H is always so keen!!).  So,  down came our "spaceship light", and up went my almost free treasure..... and what a treasure she is.  Daytime or night time, she floats my boat!  In the evening she looks like the moon, with a great warm glow perfect for ambiance and task lighting.

Can I get an oooooohhh and an aaaaahhhhh?!  I mean, hello ... that's so much better no?  Love.love.love!  The only problem with the new light is that I now want to:

1. Get a matching one for the eating area- man I got a great deal on that baby!
2. Repaint the kitchen ceiling (we have outlines of the old lights)
3. If we re-paint the ceiling we may as well re-paint the whole room
4. If we are doing all that why not switch out our hated (by me) sink?!
5. .....

Gotta love the renovation snowball effect!

For now we threw up a smaller brassy topped globe that I picked up on Freecycle over the eating area, so for the short term I no longer have to stare at the Roman Special.

And already if you squint your eyes, you can see how it will look when we have two matching lights...

 



 PS- We managed to sell the old Spaceship light on Craigslist, which means we are $30 closer to getting a second one.... only another $100-ish to go!