New black (back) door

Welcome to Monday and the WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS!! Ahhh, everybody freak out!! I have purchased maybe three presents. THREE. I’m usually late on that anyway but the arrival of our grandbaby has slowed down my process even more. (Thanks for the love on that by the way.)

So here’s two big confessions about the way I blog/DIY – one, I usually don’t know what I’m going to write each day till usually the day before. I don’t plan it out. If you haven’t noticed I’m a procrastinator (see above) and I do better when I fly by the seat of my pants. As of yesterday I had no idea what I would write about today, this is nothing new.

The other thing is that most of what gets done around here gets finished so I can blog about it. Otherwise we would live in a constant state of undone projects. We do anyway, but it would be way worse. So yesterday I decided to finish up a project that had been kind of started for a couple weeks…so I could blog about it. :)

It started with the back door:

Innocent enough, right? Well if you read this post, you’d know it’s not innocent. Not at all:

It makes for a good story – I can tell it without twitching now.

Well for years now we’ve had issues with water and that back door. I mentioned a while back we had to cut out the floor back there, down to the basement, to try to fix it. It helped for a while but water kept leaking down to the basement behind a wall. It would wick up on the baseboards – that’s the only reason we knew anything was going on.

The handyman told us years ago the whole back door would need to be replaced, so a few weeks ago when we had water leaking again we finally scheduled it. Let me tell you – this is not a cheap job. Yowza. So I finished up a lot of the detail work myself.

But when they installed it they couldn’t find another atrium door with the plastic grids we had before. So we planned on using the old ones on the new door, but when they put it up without I was kind of in love. It was so bright and open, but so different than what we were used to. I went to Instagram to ask opinions:

And I think pretty much every person said no grid and I agreed. I couldn’t believe how much more open it made that kitchen nook feel. It was crazy!

So we left them off and I seriously love it. As I said, I decided I would finish it up to save some money. All I really had to do was paint the door and the new trim – easy right? Painting a door and trim is actually about 15 steps though, so it took a while.

I primed it with gray primer a couple weeks ago:

And it sat like that till yesterday. :)

Then I puttied the holes on the new trim:

Then did one coat of black on the door:

See that new trim? I’m on a mission to change it out in the whole house! You can see how I do it here – it’s way easier than I thought it would be. Buh bye skimpy trim. Don’t let the back door hit you…

Then it was time to caulk every single corner and joint:

I shared the tool I use when I caulk here – it helps a ton!

Then finally, three more coats of paint – one more coat of black on the door, one coat of white primer and one coat white paint on the trim. It still needs one more of the white but for now I’m good:

Love that beefy trim!

I can’t finish up the black on the door till it warms up a bit. I didn’t do the side of the door at all because it. was. freezing:

This shot makes me want to rip out those itty bitty baseboards even more! Have to get the door trim done on each door first. I still have to touch up the hinges too – I spray painted them but didn’t spray them both open and closed so I didn’t get all of it. Duh.

It’s so different (to me) but I love it. Before there were LOTS of grids – on the door, on the windows and on the pantry door. This is much calmer and as I said, it makes the space feel bigger:

Although I still walk in the kitchen and for a millisecond of think the door isn’t there. That door debacle may have scarred me after all. ;)

Another project (mostly) done – and fingers crossed no more leaking! It was just in the nick of time too, we’ve had snow covering the deck since it was installed.

I loathe water issues, have I mentioned this? They seem to love us though. Do you have one of these atrium doors? With or without the grids?

An organized pantry

Good Friday to ya! Whoo-te-hoo.

I’m back today with an update on a big redo I did a couple years back – the pantry. And I hope you still like me after you read cause I have a big revelation to make.

When I decluttered the kitchen a couple weeks back this space was on the list. I joked that it was scary but honestly…it wasn’t bad. That’s when I knew I had really, finally come up with a system for this space that works.

See, years ago this is what it looked like most of the time:

Actually, that wasn’t too bad. :)

Over the years I realized something BIG about myself that kind of changed my pantry-world. I always felt like we needed to have a TON of food, just in case. That just in case ranged from a natural disaster (which I do still think you should have a stash for) to financial insecurity to Armageddon. Take your pick.

I knew exactly why I did it too – it stemmed from my childhood. The desire to never have to worry about having food in the pantry ever again. So I hoarded food. And it was a bit ridiculous, as you can see. Ridiculous because: 1. three people can’t possibly eat that much 2. we eat out a lot 3. Armageddon is not coming. Probably. At least not in my lifetime. I hope. 

So early last year I completely made over this space (took out the wire shelves, painted, installed melamine shelves), took a hard look at how we eat and changed how I bought food. Now when I cook I either plan ahead and make sure to have what we need, or I go out that day and get what I’m missing. I don’t keep food in here that I might need for that one recipe that I make every six months. I just go buy it. Because I can make the time – again this is what works for me.

When I cleaned out the pantry this time I still felt like a horrible, no good person (because of the wasted food) – but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it used to be. Because we can see what we’re eating now:

Last time I wrote about our pantry many were like, no, seriously, where’s the food? There’s a good foot of space on each side that you can’t see straight on. I do still have SOME food.

Sooooo, here’s the thing. Don’t hate me. I don’t even know if I’m allowed to blog after confessing this. Last year I loved the whole idea of the plastic containers for things like crackers, baking supplies, etc. It was kind of the thing. I liked that I could see the food and I thought we’d eat it if we could see it. Something like that?

Anyway…the thing is…I don’t use them anymore. I KNOW. Will I be banished from blogland?

Over time I realized that we were wasting food when it was in clear containers. I would try to mark the expiration on the bottom but then when you’re almost out of, say, crackers, and you go to get more, what do you do? Dump the ones that are left but still good? Put the new ones on top and mix up expiration dates? Keep the new ones in the box until the old ones in the container were gone?

See. THESE are what you call first world problems.

I mean, it wasn’t all that dramatic, but you get what I’m laying down here. It just didn’t work. And I used quite a few of them for dry cereal but my boy doesn’t like cereal (I KNOW!) and I don’t eat it like I used to so we don’t really buy much anymore.

SO. I got rid of most of the containers (in here, I’m using most of them elsewhere). The flour and sugar and all is now out on the counters where I can easily access them (in these glass containers) and the rest (for the most part) stays in the boxes.

Did I just rock your world? I have BOXES. :)

I do still use a few plastic containers for a few baking things like candy chocolate, brown sugar and my beloved popcorn:

And you can barely see it here but I use them for pasta (because I use it a lot and it doesn’t go bad as fast):

I do still use baskets in the pantry – I find them helpful to corral the smaller items like packets and mixes and such:

Last year I was able to clear out so much that I had one free shelf. I love having some mixing and serving bowls in here – they’re easy to grab when I need them:

That’s the popcorn bowls up front. Where they belong.

So there you go. The cleaned out pantry – and there’s no horrible before photo because it actually stayed pretty darn cleaned out. It’s a MIRACLE. Because we have the glass door that’s a good thing:

      

For years I felt like the pantry was SO tiny and just not big enough for our needs, but now I think it’s just fine. Keep in mind it’s usually just three of us in this house though, so what works for us may not work for a larger family. But it does feel good to let go of that need to have it packed full of food constantly.

Do you use the plastic containers for your food? Love them or no? Any tricks for keeping your pantry organized?

To see more about the door that I used for the pantry go here.
To see how I made the windows private and make the inside glow at night, go here.

Have a LOVELY weekend! Anyone planning on cleaning out their pantry now? You’re welcome.

Simple autumn tablescape

Hey all! How are ya? The cat pulled the cord out of my phone last night so we had a fun morning of running around trying to get to the bus on time. We did. ;)

Today I’m sharing my fall tablescape as we continue our fall link ups! If you’ve been following along over the years you know I got a wild hair a couple years ago and decided to get rid of our dining room and turn it into a library. It’s still in process but we LOVE it so far.

For a while this meant I really didn’t have a table to dress for the seasons (we had our round kitchen table). Not a big deal but I’m a decorating fiend and a blogger so I did miss that part a bit. But since I made our new, bigger table earlier this year, I’m able to join in on the festivities again. Whoot!

I started with a blank slate of the DIY tabletop:

I tried to use what I already had for the most part – I love our round IKEA chargers so those and my basic white plates were first:

I got the napkins at Pier 1 – LOVE them but they only had three and I needed four. So I ended up with two of the prints and two solids that matched. I like how it turned out.

The plates felt nekked when I was done so I added some gourds I picked up last weekend on each plate:

Like a smarty I only got three of the green and three of the orange – so I had to mix those up too. I was on a roll.

I created the whole table setting based around the pink flowers you see here:

I LOVE them – I can never remember what they’re called but I always see them in the fall. Any idea what they are? The bring pink is a wavy/felty feeling one and the longer ones are fuzzy and fun. They played perfectly with more hydrangeas from my pee gee trees. (You can see how I used those on the mantel here.)

I wanted to carry the flowers down the table a bit so I filled a Goodwill set with little bits of the flowers as well:

There’s a lot of Goodwill on this table – the little white creamer set, the copper sprayed candlesticks, the water goblets and glass hobnail votive holders are all from Goodwill over the years:

I love the glass aisle at Goodwill – it always draws me in. I can’t quit it.

At first I planned on putting a runner down the table, but I really wanted to see the table I worked so hard on. :)

My goal (like with the mantel) was to use more natural items and some items I already had. I didn’t want it to scream FALL – I wanted it to whisper. *Fallll.* 

I think it whispers:

Last night after I took pics the Bub asked why we were going to eat pumpkins. Love him.

This morning it was dark and rainy and I took the opportunity to light the candles again and take a few more shots:

It’s no fancy dining room but I love it. ;)

I think we’ll eat by candlelight tonight!:

This kind of thing is so fun for me – just puttering around and adding things, taking them away, arranging them just so. Hope it inspires you just a bit! :)

Do you have a dining room or just a kitchen table? I thought I would miss the dining room table more than I do – but I really don’t! It was a good choice for us for sure but wouldn’t be for everyone.

DIY roll out drawer

Hey hey! Thanks for all the comments on my navy blue lamps. ;) Love them!

Today I’m sharing a DIY I did a loooong time ago, but I added a little finishing touch yesterday and realized that I never shared it with you all. I didn’t take pics as I did it all that time ago because I honestly wasn’t sure it would work. ;)

I think I’ll still be able to explain well enough how I put this together. My idea came from my desire to have these all over my kitchen:

(source)

Ah yes…making those deep dark cabinets easier to use. ‘Tis a dream.

But that dream is expensive. Those up there are $45 each (for only 11 inches wide!), yowza. The organization in our kitchen island cabinets was nonexistent so I needed help -- but I didn’t want to spend that much to make them work. So I figured out my own way!

I’ve since seen some different ways to make this by making a shallow box for the stuff to sit in. I’m going to attempt something similar for the other cabinets later. But my version (using mostly what I had in the garage) works great!

I started with a set of drawer slides – you can find them at most hardware stores and they come in various lengths:

You’re supposed to install them on the sides of the cabinet and to the sides of a drawer, but instead I installed them on the bottom of the cabinet:

You’ll see I had to nail down some scrap mdf first because I realized right off the bat that my DIY “drawer” wouldn’t clear the lip of the cabinet unless I raised this up a bit.

I just secured the slides into the mdf using four screws – two at the front and two at the back:

Since the drawer is pulled out now you’re seeing the bottom part of the slide here. That part is covered when the slides are pushed back.

I had a scrap piece of mdf I was planning on installing on top of the slides as my “drawer,” but I couldn’t figure out how to secure the two together. I couldn’t use screws because I couldn’t get to the bottom of everything, you know? I finally had an idea to use some heavy duty Velcro – I just stuck it to the top of each slider with the other part of the Velcro on top with the sticky side up. Then laid down my piece of mdf right on top, so the Velcro stuck to the bottom of it. Does that make sense? I hope!

Here’s what I ended up with:

The Velcro connects the mdf on top to the drawer slides underneath. It also makes it so I can take it off if needed (which I did have to do once) – but that Velcro is crazy strong. It’s a struggle to get it off!

The reason I had to pull the wood board off was because the sides of it were scraping up against the screws that were used to put the island together on the sides of the cabinet. Just make sure you have plenty of clearance on each side before you install everything. 

The expandable metal rack is really a pot lid holder from IKEA, but I use them for pans here (and plates in the dining room built ins):

I didn’t want it to move around so I used some plastic holder thingamabobs to secure it to the wood.

My last addition to this project was the handle I installed yesterday. I usually just pull it out by grabbing the IKEA organizer, but this will be much easier.

My only purchase when I did this was the drawer slides – I had everything else on hand. So my version was $15 – much better than the $45 version. ;)

Mine slides easily, even with all the weight of the pans on it:

I forgot to mention – it pulls out SO far out of the cabinet: 

Awesome!! (Ignore my ugly pans.)

Oh and you’ll want to make sure your taller items are in front if you have that upper shelf inside the cabinet.

Well there you go – my DIY roll out drawer. :) Sometimes when you want something bad enough you figure out how to make it work! Do you have any of these amazing contraptions (bought or DIY’d)? I love them – they make it so much easier to access everything in the cabinet!

Too many spoons in the kitchen

Heyyyy all! How is your week going?

So you get that play on words? Cooks in the kitchen? Spoons? Well…maybe by the end of this post it will be clever.

I’m SO happy to be done with the powder room – have I mentioned that?? There’s a million reasons (hello…functioning bathroom) but one of the big ones is that I can finally start addressing some of the other little projects around the house. I told myself I would hold off until I got the bathroom done.

I told you a few months ago that I’m slowly but surely attacking the clutter hot spots around our house. At this rate I’ll be done next year in time to start it all over again, but whatever.

I’m on a mission in our kitchen to declutter the countertops. Mostly – not completely clear them off, but be smarter about the things we have out. I know it’s probably silly but lately all the utensils next to the stove were driving me crazy:

Especially considering we have a drawer right there that I use for the rest of the utensils:

Problem was, as you can see – it was a hot mess. Every time I’d put something away I would have to try to close the drawer about five times before I finally got it shut. ;)

I realized it was getting a little ridiculous – who needs all those spoons? Really? Especially for someone who rarely hardly ever occasionally cooks? So I took about 15 minutes to declutter the situation.

You’ll notice the wonky drawer organizers in that pic above – that was a little DIY project I did years ago. (I saw the idea at Stephanie’s site here.) At the time I didn’t secure them well enough so they weren’t working so great.

All I did was take scrap wood from the garage and cut it to the width of the drawer and then nail it in. Stephanie just used glue for hers but that didn’t hold well enough for me. So I needed to add one more nail to each side to make them more secure and I used the little trick I used years ago:

I used my Frogtape to mark off where the wood was so I could nail into it without missing. Does that make sense? Cause otherwise this happens:

(The nail didn’t hit the wood and came out the side.)

Obviously you still need to have good aim. Gah!

In hindsight I wish I would have installed the wood slats the long way instead of across, but if I remember right I was trying to work with scraps of wood I already had.

So once the organizers were secure again I started the purging and reorganizing. The bigger items went into a cabinet in the kitchen with like items and all the grilling stuff went outside underneath the grill:

By the way, those little marshmallow sticks telescope out and are perfect for making smores! :) I got them at the Target dollar spot last summer, not sure if they still have them.

We had doubles and triples of plenty, which I pared down. And then I found things that I have NO idea why we had:

Uhhhh…what are those?

I was able to purge plenty so now I don’t even need the holder next to the stove anymore, which was my goal:

On a side note, Squish the Fish is doing AWESOME! We’ve had this Squish for three years now and he’s the most spoiled fish I’ve ever known. My husband loves him. You can see more about the gumball fish tank here.

But let’s marvel at the lovely utensil drawer, with a (little) room to spare:

One drawer done, eleventy billion to go.

And one thing you don’t ever think you’ll do until you blog – take a picture of your utensil drawer and share it with the world.

This little spot makes me feel like I did a lot – I find decrapifying is a lot more manageable when I tackle little bits at a time.

So do you have too many spoons in your kitchen? Can you close your utensil drawer??

Our kitchen, then and now

Hey all! I’ve mentioned a few times lately that this time of year makes me nostalgic about our house. We moved in (after having it built) almost exactly nine years ago and my blogging anniversary was in May, so it’s been fun to see our house transform in real life and on the blog throughout the years. :)

One of my favorite transformations in our house is in our kitchen. Years ago I did a few projects that really made a big difference in there, and none of them were hard or expensive. Of course more has changed since then -- it looks SO different to me now!

I thought it would be fun to go back in time and then take a look at how it looks now too. I LOVE before and afters, oh yes!!

I hand picked everything in this room (well, every room) when we built – I stressed about every aspect of the room, and years later I still like the basics. The problem was it was just SO dark and heavy feeling:

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it was bad – my tastes just changed. I needed to brighten things up in there! The biggest culprit when it came to the dark feeling was the black tiled backsplash.

I tried taking it off, but that was a MESS. So I went to plan B and just covered it all with beadboard. ;)

I think it was maybe $60 or something like that? I just glued it on top and it made SUCH a huge difference in there!:

The walls are the same color, obviously the cabinets are too – but that white backsplash really makes a big impact!

Here’s another shot of the old backsplash on the other side of the room:

By the way, yes the afters are taken with a better camera and the operator (me)knows a little more about photography now, but still – check it out!:

Years ago when I did the backsplash we also changed out the faucet and sink. Little things when you think about a whole kitchen for sure, but they made a big impact.

I love my sink area. It’s nothing fancy, but I have a window and lots of natural light and it makes me happy:

You can read about installing the sink (it was a REALLY FUN TIME) and the name of the sink and faucet in this post.

Here’s another before shot from about three years ago – and seriously, it feels like it’s been ten since the room looked like this. For real, crazy:

Excuse my notes, I was explaining my changes. ;)

Now that same view looks like this:

Have I mentioned I luuuurve my new table? Maybe.

Another little project that made a big impact was the kitchen island. OK, well it wasn’t little – I think it got four redos? Five? Here it is in its builder basic glory:

Awww yeah. Everything matched.

By the way, so many of you ask me about my granite countertops. They’re actually laminate. ;) I may write a whole blog post just about them because I love them that much.

Yes. You heard me.

I love laminate.

Ours is a granite look – you can find similar counters at the Wilsonart site here. Now they make them in a high definition version too and those look even more like granite than ours do. We got an edge on ours that makes them look more like a solid surface too.

But back to the island – as I said, it got a few redos, but after the last one, this is how it ended up and has stayed:

Butcher block on top, beadboard and board and batten on the sides and a lighter color made a huge difference! I love our island and I’ve promised to leave it alone for a while. :)

A few months ago I decided to change up a weird little wall we have in the kitchen and I think it adds a bit of fun and whimsy to the room:

I always say most rooms should have something in black – I think it just grounds a space. A chalkboard wall is the perfect way to accomplish that!

My most recent change in here is in the nook area – here’s how it looked a few years ago:

Again, I’m not going to dog my “old” look and act like I didn’t love it – I did. But it changed with time like the rest of the room (and we took the big blow up pool off the deck too, gah).

Just noticed the high chair too. Sniff. ;)

Here it is now with the new light fixture and the DIY farmhouse table:

Oh yeah, and the chairs I had been drooling over for months (just a less expensive version):

 

So there it is in a nutshell – years of changes in one compact little blog post. ;)

I have been planning BIG changes in here for about two years now, but have wanted to get other projects done first. (Ahem, cough, bathrooms.) I could easily see this kitchen becoming my dream kitchen -- I just need to get a final word on some of the ideas I have (if they are possible), and then I’ll be diving in. I’m still not sure if it will be this year though.

Have you been along for the changes in here all these years? Have your tastes changed a lot over the past five years or so? Blogging kind of encourages mine to happen more than the average person I’m sure, but I do love watching the transformation!

If you have any questions on anything I didn’t mention, ask in the comments! Have a lovely weekend!