Easy Upgrades
Our Living Room Art Switch
Since lots of folks have asked for close up photos and more of an explanation about our little art switcheroo above the sofa, here it is. It’s such an easy project that anyone can do (probably for under $5 if you have the frames and some small photos or prints that you love (images from greeting cards or postcards could even work). So we figured we’d share the goods while we work on our backsplash (those goods will be up tomorrow am!).
Our frames above the sofa started out with colorful paper in them ($5 worth of craft paper from Michael’s to be exact). That added some fun oomph for a while, but the beauty of that $5 price tag was the freedom to switch things around and just sort of go with the flow. So they sat as plain blocks of color for a while…
… and then we added some fun local art prints (just taped in the middle of our colored paper)…
… but after our new rug arrived we were jonesing for something less colorful (since we had amassed a ton of colorful pillows and some bright accessories like the ceramic hurricanes on the desk). We also decided we could use some more texture, so that somehow triggered me to look in my fabric scrap bin and realize that I had enough burlap-ish textured linen-ish stuff to do the trick.
Sorry for that terrible description. It’s just a sand-colored fabric that sort of looks like linen or burlap (you know, it has those crosshatched lines running through it) that I got on super clearance from JoAnn fabrics a while back – so I don’t think it’s actually real linen and it’s a bit too soft to be burlap.
Here’s my completely not scientific framing method. I just:
- unstuck my little art squares that had been taped to the colorful fabric with a loop of tape
- used the same loop of tape to stick them to the center of the eight 12″ x 12″ fabric squares for each frame
- taped the fabric to the back of the frame’s mat on all sides (to keep it from looking saggy and wiggly)
- regular old scotch tape worked for that part, but if you have heavier fabric, something stronger like duct tape might be better
That’s it! Oh and these are Ikea’s ribba frames (with 12 x 12″ openings) if that helps. I love that my tiny polariod-ish prints make you look closer, and when you do, you see the texture in the fabric behind them. It’s really sweet, especially in person. I keep glancing over at them when I sit on the sofa.
Sometimes Burger takes John-sprawled-out-on-the-ottoman-taking-photos-of-the-art to mean that he’s supposed to sit on him. Naturally. So we took more photos and shared them over on Young House Life. Naturally.
Anyway, so the art thing was a free swap and I’ve been using the colored paper that I took out for other projects around the house – like John’s boyscout badge Christmas present.
Oh and since a few folks also requested an open-ottoman shot to see how it’s all organized in there, here ya go:
The big woven basket is my paint chip bin (yes I keep various paint decks in there and even save loose paint chips so I can later do weird things like make art or ornaments with them). The other three baskets are for various Clara toys. There’s also a giant blanket in there (it can actually stretch across the entire monster of a sectional that we have and cover me in one corner and John in the other corner, which makes me crazyhappy). It’s just a king sized blanket I found at HomeGoods a while back for 25 bucks.
So there you have it – two living room goings-on. What have you guys been framing lately? Any fabric “mats” or backgrounds? What about fabric as art? That’s always fun too! Any ottoman organization? We learned really fast that tossing things in without smaller bins and baskets = chaos. Like a small tornado hit ottoman-ville every time we cracked it open. So apparently it’s all about sub-containment inside of larger containment devices. Lesson learned.
Psst- A reader (thanks Caroline!) sent along the link to this article about why people seem to be “wired” with the desire to DIY things, and it’s so interesting! The “add one egg” thing is especially amazing to me.
Fifteen Minute, Fifteen Dolla Black Out Curtains
File this under “A Lazy Mom’s Trick To Get More Sleep.” I made no-sew, mind-numbingly-easy, shortcut-blackout curtains. Enough adjectives for you? I’m an over-explainer. Anyway, this isn’t the professional way, it’s the cheater way. Haha.
First the why. Although the faux wood blinds on Clara’s bedroom window provided a decent amount of light-blockage, I knew blackout fabric would make the room pitch black in the middle of the day (which means it might help with the just-one-forty-five-minute-nap that we’ve been getting these days). To JoAnn fabrics I flew, and purchased 5.5 yards of blackout fabric (which sort of felt like the white fabric on roller-blinds). Thanks to a 50% coupon I got it all for $15.
Now for the how:
- I returned home with the 5.5 yards of fabric (I measured her existing curtains to see how much I’d need beforehand)
- I washed the fabric (it said dry clean only but the lady at the counter said I could wash it on cold and air dry it without any issue and she was right)
- I unclipped the two fabric curtain panels from Clara’s room and laid one on the floor on top of the blackout fabric to use as a template
- I cut two blackout panels to the same size as the two curtains
- I debated sewing the back side of the fabric to the back side of the blackout fabric on three sides and then turning it rightside-in to hand sew the top closed, creating a finished panel the same way you’d make a pillow cover
- I realized I had four minutes before nap time and couldn’t wait to see if the blackout fabric would even make a difference
- I used my ring clips along the curtain rod to clip the curtain up in front of the blackout fabric without sewing anything together (thanks to the weight of both materials, the fabric drapes down in front of the liner, looking virtually identical to how it looked without it)
Haha, so with that description of virtually identical, I will now share a photo of Clara’s room that looks pretty much the same as many others I’ve shown sans blackout liner. Haha. But know that it’s there. Lurking.
So yeah, I’ll probably go back and sew at least a few sides of them together like a proper semi-dysfunctional seamstress (remember, I’m not exactly old friends with Oh Brother, but for now… it works). Clara has been giving us about 90 minutes for naptime instead of 45 for the past two days since we added it (we’ll take it!) and now sleeps 12+ straight hours overnight (from 7:30 pm to 8 am). In the keep-it-real department, she has always been an awesome night sleeper (I take no credit, it’s just how she was made) so this was more about attempting to convince her that napping for more than 45 minutes in the 12-ish hour span of day between that awesome night of sleep is a good idea. It was a total bonus that her usual 7:30 wake up time scooched back to 8.
So those blackout liners are well worth the fifteen bucks and fifteen minutes spent. Sleeping until 8 for the past two days has been amazing life saving, especially since we’ve been going to bed around 2am due to book stuff. But it’s all worth it! Can’t wait to share sneak peeks of our book shoots and other how-does-this-word-doc-become-an-actual-book stuff as we go (now that the final manuscript is in as of last night, well, this morning at 2:14am). Woot!
Have you guys taken any shortcuts lately? Are you all in complete disbelief that Clara runs around all day long and only naps for 45-90 minutes? When the Bowers came to visit Will was regularly serving up three hour naps and Jeremy couldn’t believe how Clara would pop back up a little over a half-hour later and be raring to go. And yes, I was jealous of their sweetly slumbering son. Very, very jealous. Do you know how much backsplash tile we could start installing over a nice three hour chunk of time? Haha. That’s ok though, we definitely can’t complain about the awesome night sleep Clara has given us pretty much from day one. And the fact that we can put her to bed at 7:30 and hammer away from 8 o-clock on is pretty darn awesome.
Pre-Counter Progress
We were feeling a little less than pumped about how unfinished our “new,” tile-ready walls were looking…
… mostly because we found ourselves staring at that mismatched unpainted paneling (shudder) and those ugly unpainted/stained/gross parts of the ceiling that were exposed when we removed the upper cabinets.
So what’d we do? Why we got a-paintin’ of course!
The paneling took two coats of primer and two coats of paint (just to be safe). And the ceiling took… well, more coats of primer and paint than I care to share (I lost count, actually – maybe five or six?). Since some of it was totally unpainted and other areas were stained, we just wanted to be extra sure it looked seamless with the rest of the ceiling when we were done. Thankfully, after lots o’ coats of Kilz CleanStart primer (it’s no-VOC) and the ceiling paint that the previous owners left us in the basement… it all matched in the end. Can I get a whew?
The effect was much improved kinda-sorta improved. I mean it’s still a very raw space. But once we get the new counters installed (we hope to share photos of that shebang tomorrow!), get molding back around the window, add some backsplash tile, redo the lighting, paint those cabinets, and lay our cork floors, things should look a lot more polished. So we’re happy to be inching ever so slowly towards the finish line.
The last thing we had to do before the whole counter installation was add those darn support brackets that we mentioned back in this pre-Thanksgiving post. Basically we learned from the counter template guy that any overhang over 10″ needed some support (our peninsula will have a 12″ overhang on two sides). We could’ve paid $300 to have the Corian reinforced, but the guy also mentioned a cheaper DIY option. It’s like he knew us.
So we bought six 10″ steel brackets in the hardware aisle at Lowe’s and Sherry did her favorite thing (enter spray paint, stage right). At $6 a piece it came to $36, which isn’t free, but sure beats 300 big ones.
Once they were dry I brought them in, along with some scrap pieces of wood that I cut into 12″ sections. The template guy said we shouldn’t just screw the (heavy) brackets into the cabinets alone, but instead should put some wood inside the cabinet to help them hold nice and strong by drilling into that thicker wood surface hidden behind the cabinet.
So after measuring and marking my cabinets to make sure the brackets would be evenly spaced, I loosely hammered my scrap wood in place on the other side of the cabinet (if this isn’t making sense now, it will by the end of the post… hopefully).
To screw them in, I used another scrap piece of wood to act as my temporary counter so I was sure to place them at the right height (to be sure they would carry the load of the overhang without being too high or too low). Then I secured the bracket with three screws.
Here’s how it was looking after I secured the first three brackets in place. Of course, once the counters arrive we’ll also screw them into the Corian from below (Corian has wood reinforcement stuff to screw into underneath it whenever it’s manufactured for an overhang).
And although once the counters are installed and the cabinets are all painted white the brackets will barely be visible, we’re still thinking that we’ll add some shaker-style panels to dress up the back (and side?) of the peninsula. That way those will add some detailing and also allow us to completely hide the brackets behind some panel trim (by routing out the back of it and laying it over the brackets to conceal them). Hopefully it’ll be a fun challenge. I’ll keep you posted on that when we get to that step.
So here’s the kitchen in its counter-ready state. Oh, perhaps you’ll notice that we also primed a stripe of the refrigerator surround right where it meets the counter:
We didn’t want to prime and paint the cabinets before our impending counter installation (when our granite counters got installed in our first house, the white cabinets required lots of touch ups due to tons of scraping and shoving to get the heavy, tight fitting counters in place). So we’d rather just cover the counters and paint stuff afterward. But we thought that little stripe of primer applied beforehand would make it easier to paint right up to the edge of the counters without leaving a sliver of wood peeking through (now if there’s a tiny gap between the paint and the counters, it’ll be white and not brown, so it should blend right in).
It’s looking somewhat like a kitchen, right? Oh but of course ignore the wood chairs (they’re not counter height or the right color so they’re just place-holders for now).
In keeping-it-real news, the kitchen is actually looking more like this:
Of course, as parents when we saw those exposed brackets our “Toddler Impalement Device!” alarms went off, but thanks to some leftover cabinet shelves, we fashioned a dummy counter to make the edges more visible to Clara (and her sometimes clumsy parents). Having the chairs there certainly helps too.
Maybe we should just cancel our Corian order and learn to love these?
Yeah, or not. So excited that our next update for you guys should be INSTALLED COUNTERS. Hopefully tomorrow morning. Woot!
Oh how joyfully we’ll use the sink (my have we missed it!). Merry Countermas to us! We actually have a working fridge, stove, and dishwasher so we’re still able to cook at home (thank goodness) but washing the not-dishwasher-safe-stuff in the bathroom sink/tub is annoying. Is there anything you guys are anxiously awaiting? Have you done any ceiling priming & painting lately? Did you lose count of the coats. Oh man, it feels good to be done, doesn’t it?
Psst- We’ve listed our old granite counters on craigslist for anyone who is interested. You can find more info on them here.
Hoo Dat?
Dude, my dad is an artist. I mean not by trade (he’s a super-genius math teacher), but both he and my mother sketched and drew for fun during my childhood (in turn art was my favorite subject in school and off I went to get a bachelor of fine arts in NYC). I remember being in complete awe about how my mom drew horses and ladies while I loved how my dad drew all sorts of abstract shapes that filled a page with lines and dots and squares. Sort of like this.
So about a week ago I was standing in the frame hallway thinking about my dad and his awesome drawings and realized that I needed one to frame in honor of him and his super cool art skillz that inspired me so much as a kid. So I called him up (you can see an old picture of him here) and begged him to photocopy one of them and send me the copy in a big rigid “do not bend” envelope. But he did me one better. He sent me the original (!) of what he calls his “best drawing ever” – a super sweet seventies-tastic owl that he sketched in 1972 (when I was negative ten years old).
First of all, I love that dad named him “Owlie” since I’m no stranger to naming my ceramic animals (like this gal). I also love that if you look closely you’ll see that the entire owl is made up of repeating shapes and patterns (totally a signature thing that my dad did in nearly all of his sketches). And everything from the repeated hexagons to the soft layered colors that feel so “authentic seventies” just makes me smile. I know owls are all the rage these days, but I love that my father sketched this guy 39 years ago! Although maybe owls were hot commodities then too. Haha. Everything old is new again.
Anyway, true to my obnoxiously excitable personality, the receipt of this amazing guy got me ridiculously hyper. Stupid-giddy even. I couldn’t bring myself to frame the original (way too precious) so I decided to scan it so I could mail the original right back to dad where it belonged. And since my father had mentioned that he wished he hadn’t cut it down and matted it on purple paper decades ago, I took the opportunity to “digitally restore” his sketch to its original glory by putting it on a while background just as it had originally appeared. I also moved the little signature and date together for the new not-cut-down arrangement while I was at it:
Then I printed it out and popped it into a hallway gallery frame that had something less exciting (a picture of our wedding table, but we already have a few other more beloved wedding pics on the wall so… it got dethroned by Owlie).
Total spent: $0.
I think it makes the entire wall.
And sure enough, when we recently had some people over they gravitated to it and I got to proudly tell them that my father drew it in 1972! Woo to the hoo. Get it? Owl? Hoo? See what I did there?
Anyway, I love me some dad-made owl art. And as many of you know, I also love me some crocheted owl hattage on the bean (she calls this her “hoo hat”). Can my child really be into bad puns at the ripe old age of a year and a half?
With us parents… I think so. Oh and in case you haven’t seen her singing Adele, here’s that link for ya.
Have you guys framed anything that your friends or relatives have drawn? Did you only feel right keeping a copy of it? For some reason the original just feels like it belongs at dad’s house taped up next to his desk like it always has been (I also sent him a “digitally restored” printout, in case he wants one of those). What’s with kids wanting their parents to keep their houses exactly the same for sentimental reasons, anyway?
Psst- We announced this weeks three giveaway winners! Click here to see if you’re one of them.
All The Little Things
Some aspects of this kitchen remodel are certainly less exciting than others – especially when compared to having just opened the wall up. But alas, these things must be done. Including a few that we wanted to accomplish before the countertop guy came to template for our new counters (that’s something we want done accurately, after all).
First on our list of little things was filling the gaps next to our stove.
The base cabinet that we removed was 36″ wide, but the stove is only about 30″ leaving a little under 3″ of nothingness on either side. Since you can’t squeeze much function into two and 3/4ths inches (almost every pull-out drawer was 3″ or more), we decided just to put in filler pieces of wood. Oh and for anyone wondering why we didn’t scoot the stove to one side and add a wider pull out drawer, if we didn’t leave the stove centered the hood would be off-center, which would mean widening the ceiling hole (= drama). Plus none of the thin slide out drawers had doors that looked like our existing ones anyway, so it was just not worth the money/trouble. And although we thought about some sort of ornate leg or braided detail, we ultimately decided that we wanted other things like the wall of penny tile backsplash to be the star (along with items on our floating shelves), so two thin and basic filler pieces of wood were our final pick.
I grabbed a few pine “project boards” at Lowe’s, cut them to size, and drilled some pilot holes with my Kreg jig before screwing them carefully into place.
Obviously we needed the fillers at the front to visually fill the gap, but we also decided to put one at the back in case the counter guy needed it for support:
In total, each side had three separate filler pieces. We probably could’ve gotten away with two, but it’s not like the boards were breaking the bank (I spent about $11 total on this entire project – which is at least $100 cheaper than some sort of pull out dealie).
Here are both sides done (ready for the stove to slide back into place):
Not bad, eh? Once the counters are on and the cabinets are primed and painted no one will even notice them. Especially since many of the other base cabinets in our kitchen already have fillers in the 2.5″ range.
Then we stepped a little closer and put on our Picky Pants and we saw that there was still a noticeable gap. Guess we’ve gotta go buy a bigger stove…
Kidding. Obviously I just needed to add one more sliver of filler wood. The gap was just over 1/4 of an inch, and I knew we could do better. So I headed back out to Lowe’s a grabbed a couple of these.
It’s a 3/8″ thick project board that fit perfectly into my slightly-too-big gap, thank goodness (though they added $4 to my total budget, now breaking the bank at $15). So I nailed those two suckers in place, being super sensitive to keeping them flush with my other filler piece along the front.
Here’s what they looked like on both sides. I didn’t bother putting them any further than the first two panels since they were strictly aesthetic.
Then we just slid the stove back in. MUCH better. I know it’s hard to tell in the pic below, but trust us that it’s just about as snug as we’d ever want it (any closer it would be hard to get the stove in and out). Oh and once we demo the tile from behind the stove it’ll be able to push back against the wall a bit more for a more flush look. And once we add the toe kick across the front of all the cabinets the bottom will be seamless too.
So with that done…
… our next little task was over on the peninsula.
Since we don’t want the guy templating the counters to think we want an angled corner or anything, we wanted to attach a flat panel on the back of the entire peninsula. It’s something we’d have to do eventually, so why not tackle it while we wait for counters? You can see in the photo above that I had already attached a little corner piece to anchor the panel against the half wall. Here it is a little closer:
It’s basically just two scrap pieces of wood that I screwed together at a 90-degree angle using my jig. Then I screwed it into the wall so that the flat edge would be flush with the back of the cabinets. Then I was ready to attach my plywood panel.
I actually bought this piece of wood back when I got the plywood for our refrigerator built-in so I could transport it in my rented Lowe’s truck (how’s that for thinking ahead!). It’s just a thin piece of “utility plywood” that the Lowe’s guy recommended. It was a whopping $9. They had cut it to size for me in the wood cutting area, but because we had later switched from a 21″ end cabinet to an 18″ end cabinet I had 3″ of overhang that I had to cut off with my jigsaw.
So here it is all cut and nailed into place:
Not very exciting looking, we know. Eventually we’ll be adding trim – baseboards, corner pieces and maybe even a three paneled board and batten look. Not sure yet. Oh, and it will of course get painted to match the cabinets. But for now it accomplishes the goal of squaring off that corner for the countertop measuring festivities (it’ll have a 12″ overhang of Corian on two sides to accommodate four stools).
Can you sort of start to see how it’s coming together? Of course the chairs are placeholder and we hope to get some lighter looking stools (maybe made of acrylic for a nice airy feeling).
Oh, and do you notice the other thing that we did in the picture above? I’ll give you a hint. It starts with a “p” and ends with “aint touch ups.”
Obviously paint was not a critical step for the counter templating process, but it was more for our sanity (and we had it all on hand so it was free). There’s still lots to be painted (um, hello cabinets – but those have to wait until we get our counters in to avoid dings). So we got busy painting the raw trim, drywall, and paneling leftover from the pantry/fridge shuffle and wall opening. It really does make our exceedingly unfinished kitchen look a smidge less unfinished.
You’ll notice that we opted to paint the inside edge of the half wall light grey like the dining room. We figured it’d be weird to carry the grellow that’s on the kitchen paneling over since the side of the half-wall is drywall (like the light gray dining room). The soft grey is much more subtle and almost looks white like the rest of the door jamb, so it works nicely.
Oh and don’t mind the drip on the “temporary threshold.” That’s actually just a piece of paneling that we had leftover from the wall opening project that we cut down, flipped painted-side-down, and nailed in to bridge the gap that was created by removing the wall. It’ll eventually get covered with cork and we’ll add a very small threshold to join the cork to the original hardwood (just like we did in our first house where the original hardwoods met the new ones that we added to half of the house).
Now here are a bunch of “after painting” pictures of the kitchen and dining room (since it’s the closest thing we’ll have to a polished after for at least a few months). But ignore the two oddly placed floor lamps in the dining room (we can’t wait to get a big chandelier for over the dining table) along with the new microwave box sitting near the built ins (the new dishwasher box is hanging out in the office until install time).
Oh, and although it’s not the most glamorous angle, a few folks requested a view from the living room, so here it is. We love that we can see the giant picture window from the back of the house. Widening this doorway would definitely be a nice change, but having widened a former-exterior brick wall in our first house we know it’s a messy and not necessarily easy job (this used to be the back of our house before they added an addition, which means it’s hugely load bearing and could be a big ol’ can of worms). So for now it’s on our “maybe someday list.” Although sometimes we think we’ll appreciate the privacy in the living room since it’s not a big wide-open straight shot from the front window to the back of the house.
Wow, that was a lot of pictures for a post about little things like filling gaps around the stove, nailing a panel to the peninsula, and doing some paint touch ups. I counted an even 30 photos. Guess we’ve been a bit trigger happy with the camera lately. Must have something to do with that glorious new doorway of ours. And yes, we still walk into the kitchen and grin at it like fools.
What little updates or small progress have you made on projects around your house? Any last minute tasks that you’re trying to bang out before this weekend or Thanksgiving?
Psst- We announced this week’s giveaway winner. Click here to see if it’s you.
