It's Kind of Like The Teselecta

Which, if you don't watch Dr. Who, is a human sized robot with little people in it that can shapeshift. It essentially puts up a false front, which is kind of what our kitchen is doing right now.

After starting with something like this:

We are now living with something a little more like this:

Which is certainly an upgrade if I've ever seen one! We loved being able to paint it and make it our own. The only issue came with actually using our kitchen. With the cabinet doors off and everything exposed, it was more difficult to use the kitchen to actually cook in, so I decided to jump the gun a bit and put the doors back on. The problem?

The insides of our cabinet doors aren't done! Oops! Honestly, you can only tell if you, ya know, open them, so it's not that bothersome. We are planning on finishing them, too. I've needed a break from painting lately though (I'm having some pain in my wrist. Wonder if that has ANYTHING  to do with all the painting I've been doing?!), so we just moved on to another step.

You'll notice that the outside slat of each door HAS been painted. Well, knowing what a pain it is to paint around details, I put down a coat quickly before we added some much needed accessories. First, we put all of our door handles on! I went to the Target in Hamburg Pavilion (Woo, Lexington! Two Targets!) and they had exactly three boxes left of our handles! Score!

Beth and I took an hour to install them and boy, do they really make the place feel fancy. Since there were no door handles at all on the cabinet fronts before, we didn't need to fill any holes before painting, too, which made the process that much better. I like how they look on the top cabinets, but I looove how they look on the bottoms even better.

I think it's also because those were the trickiest to open without handles anyway.

We also realized how loud our cabinets closed. It then occurred to us that we had to take off all of the door bumpers to paint them, so we found some cork replacements at Home Depot and now closing a door doesn't mean echoing a slam through the house each time.

So we're looking pretty good (aside from our hidden, unfinished shame). We even painted the walls the same color as the front room. I discovered that since the light in the kitchen was different from the front room (Tungsten vs. Natural light), that it came off much more green than grey in the kitchen. I got bored, grab a brush, and just started painting. Scott even said that he liked it because it just looks like it was, "always supposed to have been that color", which I'll take as a positive!

Unfortunately, the nice looking cabinets have brought to our attention the rest of our list of things we would like to do to the room.

Counter tops- We would love to replace them with something nicer, especially since ours are worn, tarnished, and stained (And don't go with the new do, yo).

Floor- We currently have the tile-by-tile type vinyl flooring, which wears well, but isn't the most attractive. I don't want to say it's ugly, but I will say that it matches the counter tops! We have found a different type of affordable vinyl flooring that is a little nicer that fits with both the style of the kitchen and our budget. It comes in individual planks and is supposed to wear almost as well as laminate flooring. It also comes in a nice dark wood finish which will really make the rest of the kitchen pop!

Don't even get me started on the corner next to the fridge. We are currently using some old wire shelves that we had at the apartment to hold our microwave and some of the other larger and more awkward kitchen supplies, but I would love to replace it with this.

So that it no longer looks like this.

So much to do, so little time.

Speaking of time, we are still having our roof put on. The roof over the main house is finished (Huzzah!), but the addition is causing some additional problems. Har har. When it's finished, you'll have to come back, gawk at pics of our new beautiful roof, and hear my tale of woe, weather, and water leaks.

Till then, have a great week!

Knob Creek

No, not the bourbon. It's pretty descriptive of our Saturday, though.

We loved the color of the walls in the front room/hallway, but there was something still making it look a little odd. Besides the fact that the door at the end of the corridor is actually on a slant, we realized that what was throwing us off was that none of our door handles matched.

There was a mish-mash of different finishes and styles on every door which make it looks a little slap dash. Thankfully, this was easily fixed.

First, we pulled all of the handles off of the doors in the hallway and the french doors in the livingroom. Then, using my trusty IKEA sofa box in the garage, I laid everything out on the floor so I could give them a new life.

One side of the door handle sat flat on the cardboard with no issue, but the other side of the handle has a protruding portion that activates the mechanism inside the door. Because I was spray painting and wanted even coats, I had to make sure that the handle was exposed all the way around. I ended up using one of our old moving boxes and just poking the protruding part of the handle into the box with the handles themselves sticking out. It turned out like this.

Then I grabbed some of this.

And did some of this.

We also wanted to take down the light in the hall and paint it to match. Unfortunately, upon further review, the light that was there wasn't in great shape. The glass globe no longer lined up with the sides of the mount. In fact, the globe was butted up against the light bulb itself, making it a bit dangerous. It doesn't help that the whole thing was literally held together by a small nut.

I had to get another can of Oil Rubbed Bronze anyway, so we swung over to the lighting aisle and picked up a new light for just $10. This one is the same style, but uses two bulbs for more light and has an oil rubbed bronze finish already.

So Scott took down the old light.

I put the old light in the new light's box, just to keep the pieces together.

And I put a light coat of the oil rubbed bronze paint on it, so the sheen matched the door handles.

Then Scott lined it up with the two existing holes from the previous light and used the included diagram to hook up the wires (Don't worry, we turned off the power using both the switch and the breaker before doing this step).

We then put all of the door handles back on the doors. It's amazing how little changes can make your house feel so much more grand.

(I just need to put another coat on the edging at the top. The yellow just won't die!)

TEASER:

In other news, we are getting our brand new roof today! They delivered the materials on Friday and are going to try to do the entire install today, so we're excited! This little guy was hanging out on the shingles and he seemed pretty excited, too! You could say he's 'said a little prayer' for us!

Tom Cruise is in the Closet

Aside from South Park references, there really WAS something terrible in our closet. More pink.

I'm guessing that it was painted pink to match the "Girls Bathroom" that is across the hall. Since I have temporarily made life better for the guest bathroom, I figured I would really make the hall feel the love, too, by also taking the closet on as a quick project.

First, I took out all of the shelves and the previous owners leavings (a black bra and some perfume, ooh la la!), then painted the inside of the closet the same muted green as the front room/hallway area. This really helped to tie it into the space, but is neutral enough to not make our linens look dirty in the reflected light.

Then it was time to tackle the shelves. The shelves themselves weren't in terrible shape. They're solid wood and they fit the space well, so I just wanted to spruce them up a bit.

After ripping off all of the heart shelf liner (why is there different shelf of this house?!), I put some of the white sticky shelf liner from the kitchen cabinets on them. They looked so good! I went to place them in the closet with high hopes of quick accomplishment when...

Womp womp. The wood sides of the shelves looked reeeeally out of place. I tried to cover them with more shelf liner, but the sides of the boards wouldn't accept the adhesive because they had been polyurethaned. Instead, I grabbed my trusty craft brush again and hand painted all of the exposed boards so they would match (I say "hand painted" to make it sound like work, but it really wasn't at all. Super duper easy). After three coats of the white paint and filling it up with stuff, we were left with this.

It may not seem like a big deal to most people, but getting out clean linens that look clean from a clean looking closet is actually something I think us apartment dwells take for granted (at least at our apartment I did!). The entire project, if I hadn't been lazy, would probably have taken me an hour and a half. It also took $0. We already had the shelf liner, the paint for the walls (Same as the hallway), and paint for the shelves (Same as the upper cabinets in the kitchen).

Do you have any weird little projects that just made your space feel better? Let me know in the comments!