Saturday, April 9, 2011

New Dining Room Chairs!

Once the kitchen was completed it was time to finally tackle the dining area!  I already had the perfect table but I needed to finish the chairs.  Since I had introduced the turquoise color to my kitchen I was able to use the vintage Waverly fabric from Aunt Melanie for the chairs!  I am so excited because before the kitchen was re-done there was really no way to make the fabric work.  The two end chairs are turquoise and the 4 middle chairs are white.  I also included pictures of the armoire which holds my sewing supplies.  I sew on the dining table and this makes it super convenient.  The mirror on the armoire is painted turquoise to match the chairs.  I super happy with how everything is coming together!!!!
 

Sunday, April 3, 2011

A fresh new look for my kitchen

I have been dying to re-do my kitchen cabinets ever since I moved into my house 6 years ago.  Back then your options were to re-face or completely re-place, but thanks to the amazing primers they make now I was able to paint mine.  It wasn't an easy job at all BUT GrannyShabLu showed up to help with the majority of the project which was AWESOME!  We started Friday morning at 11am, Granny left around 4pm, I continued until 6pm, then took a 2 hour dinner/vino break (ahhhhhh), then continued until about 12:30am (alone), Frenchy was sleepy :).  I used two coats of primer and 2-3 coats of paint.  Today is Sunday and I'm still exhausted but thrilled with the result!  It's actually sooooooo much better than I expected.  
I knew going into the project that I wanted to add the bright turquoise blue that I've been obsessed with to my color scheme.  That idea wasn't easy and GrannyShabLu made that very clear to me!  Hmmph.  I was at Peir 1 the other day though and found the kitchen towels ($7.95 each) you see throughout the kitchen and they made it possible!  They have every color of the rainbow but most importantly they have the dark greyish, green color of my walls and the bright turquoise I loooooooove!  So I knew immediately with just that silly towel I could make it work.  I found the strainer ($9.95) at Home Goods and a pot holder ($3.95) at World Market in the same color. For the cabinets I knew they needed to be bright and light so I used Country White from Wal Mart.  The gallon costs $16.00 (I used about the whole gallon!) and is a perfect white that's not too off-white and not too bright-white.  Granny insisted that I paint the two main kitchen walls white too.  Ugh!  That took forever due to horrible planning.  Granny just started painting (without primer) so it took about 6 coats!  AHHHHHH!  I do love the result though, so thanks Granny!  I kept all the hardware the same on the lower cabinets but replaced the ones on upper cabinets.  This is where I splurged.  Each pull was $4.99 but I did only need 5 so I went for it.  Basically it took a really loooooong day and about $100 and I DID IT!!!!!  The result is soooo sweet!!!!!!

Before: 
 Before:

AFTER!!!!




 World Market knobs....looove them!





The Pier 1 Dish Towel!