Texas House : Kitchen

I didn't make it a month with the kitchen the way it was before my paintbrush came out and I started going gray (Moonshine by BM).

The way it was before was entirely too busy for me.  The star of the show should be the cabinets, granite, and the backsplash.  There was no need for all of the faux gold / beige paint.  It's not BAD, it's just not us.

This is the main kitchen area.  Then there's a single pendant light that hangs down over I have no idea what's supposed to be there.  I call it the giant boob light.  Chris says he likes it.  Shocker!

Just past the giant boob light is the eat in kitchen area with a chandelier.  We have a dining room too.  So yeah, the giant boob light area confuses me.

Here's a view of the whole thing from the kitchen cabinet point of view :

 And another from our kitchen table point of view.

Besides being too busy, it was entirely too dark for me too.  I like things bright and airy.  I know, show you the after's already...

First up, our eating area.

I haven't painted the ceilings yet, but it bugs me as is, so I'm sure I'll get around to it before too long.  Ceilings are such a workout though!  I can't decide if I want to go a lighter gray or a lighter blue or just mix it up at least for just the eating area and do a dark blue.  Sort of like this picture.  as I've mentioned before, the trim and shutters are all a cream / off-white, so white is out.

 I have three little vases that I leave on the table.  Kalia and I go pick flowers to put in there.  And then she talks about them nonstop!  I got them from Antro on clearance awhile back.

The crossed ski's and pictures, as well as that HART sign I re-made found their home here in this house.

So did the key art I made.

The kitchen might as well be another playroom for Kalia.  I keep her toys all over the place in here to keep her occupied when I'm cutting up stuff or doing oven stuff that could hurt her.  She is definitely a little helper, but there are times when it's safer for those little hands of hers to be occupied elsewhere!

Under the boob light is a little craft table and two chairs and a bench.  It's the only thing that makes sense there to me.

There are placemats on the table because Kalia is boycotting her high chair, and the big table is a little scary with how much she wiggles around, so we ALL eat at this table.

There is a paper roll to the right of it, and those little drawers hold play doh and coloring books.  She loves this little table!!  It's an two year old pottery barn table (they don't even make that big of one anymore, it's 54"), and we bought it off of craigslist.  There was marker all over it and it was sort of dirty, but nothing a little elbow grease and a magic eraser pad couldn't take care of.  Chris didn't want to buy it initially, and then was like "Wow!!  We got the deal of the century!!  How come they didn't do that BEFORE they sold it??!  They could've gotten a TON more for this!!" It pretty much looks as good as new, cept it's already broken in.  Love that Craig and his ingenious list!!

Oh, and another thing the magic eraser is great at is cleaning grout.  I got down and scrubbed the brown grout until it turned gray.  It was an arm workout, but not as bad as I thought it would be!

Before :

Exact same tiles after :

Amazing!!!  The Target brand worked just as well too, fyi!

The view from the kitchen sink :

 The view OF the kitchen sink :

and the view from the fridge :

No, all of that fruit isn't there for staging.  We eat A LOT.  All of us, including Kalia.  Ask anyone that has had us over for dinner.  We are GOOD eaters.  Hey, at least it's healthy!

I keep another few baskets of toys under this side of the island too.  Can't keep anything there that isn't Kalia friendly, so rather than fighting to keep her little hands out of things, I just give them something to do!

I said I wasn't going to paint these cabinets, but the more I live with them, the more I want to change something up.  The paint job is good enough for now though!  What do you guys think?

Happy Monday!  Hope everyone had a great weekend!

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Texas House : Kalia's Nursery Suite

For many of you, Kalia's nursery was what brought you over to my blog in the first place.  Here it is at our last house :

And here's what it started with there :

Yeah, about a million times better.  Maybe 2 million.  We did so many DIY projects in there, it was definitely a labor of love.

Kalia hasn't adjusted so well to the move.  We were in an apartment for a month, which was so confusing to her.  She's at that awkward age where she remembers stuff, knows what she wants, but can't exactly express it or her emotions that she's feeling.  The first time she talked to any other little kid since the first week of us being here was the 4th of July.  She still won't talk to adults.

So, we knew it was so important to get her room set up just the way it was before asap.  We were so so thankful that my MIL came to help out with the move.  It allowed us to paint Kalia's room prior to the movers showing up with our stuff (walls moonshine by benjamin moore and closet lucerne by benjamin moore), and on day 2 of living there, get everything on the walls the exact way it was before.  Here's what we started with.  Much better than the above before picture!

And here's what it looks like when you walk in :

I did say previously that those bookshelves would stay if we ever left our Florida house.  I never really thought we'd leave when I said that though.  They came with us.

The wall here is a little bit smaller so we had to cut them down by about 8 inches.  I think they're my most favorite thing still.

The ABC wall is Kalia's favorite.  She asked for it nonstop when we were in the apartment.  When we moved here that was the first thing she asked for "ABC's on the wall!!!".  Chris didn't really want to put 26 more holes in the wall, but Kalia and I outnumber him!

Here is the view from Kalia's closet on the other side of the room.

I realize the curtains look like high-waters.  They work for now, and I really do love the curtains, just wish they were longer.  I'll probably sew something on there when they start to bother me too much.  When she's ready for her big girl bed, one of the daybeds will go where the dresser is, and the dresser will move to the other wall.  I still don't love the cream trim, and all of my accents are white though.  If I win the lottery I'll pay someone to paint all of the doors, shutters, and trim white.  Gotta get on playing first!

We built the bookshelves, dresser, and the K with my maternity pictures of Kalia on there. All of that is linked up in Kalia's initial nursery tour here.

Here's the view to the left of the crib.

You can see the picture frame with fabric and mini clothes pins I did for her before she was born.  I want to hang them closer together, they bug me as is.  We spaced them a little bit too far apart.

Kalia's closet was "prettier" at the last house, but she's got more room with it here.  She loves that little mirror down there, and it's anchored on with a nail on either side, so I'm not worried about it going anywhere.  That's the toy box we built for her along with the no sew cushion I made.

Across from her room is her bathroom.  She loves the big tub in our bathroom, so I haven't touched this room yet.  I imagine it'll stay pretty plain for a little while, although she was begging me to get these bobble headed monkeys for her bathroom decor at bed, bath, and beyond the other day.  Already?!

So that's it!  Kalia's nursery.  What do you guys think?  It's still one of my favorite rooms in the house!   It is funny / odd to me that the moonshine gray color reads more blue in this house than in the last one.  I don't know if that's because the ceilings are all painted that almond color or just different light or what.  It's so different how almost every ceiling in the Texas houses that we looked at were painted the same as the wall color.  I had that same gray in Kalia's room, the in-law suite, the laundry room, our bathroom, and the half bath at the old house and it definitely didn't have a blue hue to it in any of those rooms.  Funny how paint does that!

Hope everyone had a great weekend!  Happy Monday!

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Building Crown Ledges

I am so excited for today's post!  For my very first time, I teamed up with the amazing Ana White to bring you this.  I came across her blog over two years ago when I wanted to buy a bench that was outside of my price point, and found her plans to build one instead.  She is one of my favorite blogs and virtual people to keep up with, and is so so talented.  It's such an honor to work with her!  

As most of the things I build start, I saw this :

Image Courtesy of Restoration Hardware

And wanted two of the large ones for above the entire length of Kalia's chalk wall.  Except I wanted the finish to be a little bit brighter, more appropriate for a fun playroom...and by no means did I want to pay the $225 plus tax and shipping per ledge for their 75" ones.

I think I told Chris about 100 times that we could build these before he bought into it with me using scrap pieces we had lying around to do a mach up version of these.  They are seriously so simple to make.

Lucky for you, Ana White drew up an amazing how to, so you don't have to follow my scrap board pieces to buld this for yourself.  Just hop over to her site and follow the simple directions!

The ledge is essentially two 1x5's and a piece of crown molding between the two.  We used a 1x4 for the top and a 1x5 for the bottom piece...

...and then used a nail gun to put the crown molding piece in between.

Because our ledges go all the way across the wall, we only had to worry about finishing one out of the four ends of our ledges...which was the only sort of tricky part with this whole project.

For the full tutorial, check out here : Ana White Building Crown Ledges .

After both ledges were put together,

I primed it all and then gave it a few good sandings with my 150 grit sandpaper, followed by a final coat of the 200 grit sandpaper, until the entire thing felt really smooth.

After that, I painted my base coat of turquoise on.  I used left over paint that I had from my sewing cabinet makeover I did awhile back.

I know, entirely too bright, but I expected that!  Like I said, this was my base coat.  Two notes about this...

1.  That orange container you see there is a big thing of Floetrol.  For painting things, it is my best friend.  Especially in this extremely high Florida humidity.  It basically acts as a conditioner for latex paints.  It extends out the drying time and makes it a whole lot easier to eliminate brush strokes.

2.  I almost always do a test run on pieces to see if I can get the desired outcome before just jumping on board with painting the entire thing when they're this big.  I took scraps and painted about a million different color and finishing combinations until I came up with one I liked.  Much easier than being frustrated at the end with all of the hard work you do on a large piece!

After I put the base coat on, I took some leftover gel stain I had (Minwax's Red Mahogony) and spread it generously on top.

My goofy hubs took that picture and then decided that I looked creepy with no head, so he needed a head shot too.  Maybe I was supposed to photoshop these two pictures together, but I don't know how to use photoshop, so you just get the picture.

I wiped off the excess gel stain until I got to a color combo I liked.  There was a minor freak out moment here where I couldn't get the gel stain off quick enough and I thought I ruined the entire thing and was going to have to sand it all down and start from scratch.  Chris (goofy hubs!) came to the rescue and told me to just wipe it down with paint thinner.  That was actually a brilliant move.  I just added a little bit of paint thinner to my rag and went up and down until I got the ledges just right finish wise.  Then I sanded down the edges a bit and added a few coats of polycrylic, and viola!

We added j hooks to the back and mounted both ledges side by side.

Details shots :

Here's our finished ledges at Kalia's birthday party (thanks E for taking these pictures!) :

The total cost of this for both ledges was $100.  That sure beats getting two of RH's ledges for $500 + once you add in tax and shipping, and my ledges are two feet bigger!

So what do you think of them?  We really love how this room is coming together.  It's a really fun bright space!

I'm actually going to do something a little different with pictures on the ledge, I'll have to share what I wind up with at the end.  This was so fun to put together, to reflect back on some of our favorite memories with our little girl.  Where oh where did the last year go?!?!

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.  We just got back from a 2+ week family vacation, so I'm really behind in posts.  Hopefully I can catch up with some things this weekend and be back on track.  Happy Friday!


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