Dreaming & Scheming - The Kitchen Revisited

It's time for an updated version of the old Dreaming & Scheming Kitchen post from October of 2013.  Last week I shared some inspiration pictures and the breakdown of the big To Do list, but I wanted to share some more details of where we stand right now for the actual design.

I used Ikea's kitchen planner to show you what I think it'll look like, though until the wall comes down nothing is 100%.  I don't think we'll go with Ikea cabinets (currently we are thinking of doing something much crazier), but their planner is just so easy to use.  I did the best I could using Ikea's standard cabinets.  

The peninsula was the hardest to create because it did NOT want me to flip it around and have the doors open towards the dining room and I gave up which is why it doesn't reach the wall on that one side (in real life it will).  Computers, ugh.

In real life the sink will be centered under the window, but with their cabinet sizes and sink size it was hard to make that work without a gap.

Right now we only have one stretch of counter top on either side of the sink.  So this picture of having a L shaped counter in addition to a little peninsula and an area on either side of the stove is crazy.  I NEED ALL THE SURFACES.

I want shaker style drawer fronts and doors and I like this gray color.  I also like the dark handles.  Currently we are leaning towards butcher block counter tops.  I want to do the backsplash with white subway tile and on the wall with the sink it'll go up the ceiling!  ACCENT WALL!

Look at that beauteous DISHWASHER.  That weird area to the right is the peninsula which will look normal in real life.

There's a lazy susan in the corner:

This picture makes me want to chose a smaller fridge.  We'll definitely have to tape this part out on the floor to play around with dimensions to maximize space without it feeling suffocating when you come in from the breezeway and/or pantry/laundry room area.  We might end up moving the garbage by the sink to shorten the one stretch of counter.

Here are some pictures again but this time I'll write what's going in each section.  I think it's really important to think this through before picking your cabinets because as you're putting your stuff away it's too late to add & move drawers around.

By Baking Tools I mean measuring cups & spoons, whisks, pastry cutter, biscuit cutters, rolling pin, etc.  

By Baking Pantry I mean I am going to move my containers of baking powder/soda, salt, vanilla extract, cocoa powder, etc over into this drawer.

The appliances I want to put in the lazy susan corner cabinet are the rice maker, popcorn maker, panini press, & crock pot.

By Kitchen Gadgetry I mean the cheese grater, mandolin, kitchen scale, ladle, can opener, garlic press, peeler, pineapple corer etc.

By Cooking Utensils I mean tongs, spatulas, wooden spoons,  hot pads etc.

By "Junk" Drawer I mean that's where we'll put tape, scissors, batteries, matches, a tape measurer, menus etc.

I am torn about having seating at the peninsula.  The dining room table will be right behind it with a window seat under the dining room window.  I just think it might be tough to even fit stools over there and have room around the table.  I mostly want the peninsula just to maximize counter space and to give a place to put mason jars and the canner.


And on to the most controversial part, open shelving!

I don't want to be dusting all the time.  So I am only putting things on the shelves that will either be used a lot or things that are used rarely and need to be rinsed off even if they're in a cabinet.  

My only stipulation is that things looks nice.  So I'll probably put my Le Creuset dutch oven up there, my cake plates, some nicer mixing bowls, just anything that'll look good up there and needs a home.

I just showed the shelf, but there will be brackets holding them up.  I am undecided about wooden ones painted the wall color or having metal ones that would stand out.   Here's one of my inspiration pictures:

Height-wise, I was going to start from the standard placement for upper cabinets and adjust if need be so the blender fits under the bottom shelf.  Right now I'm just thinking two shelves on either side of the sink, because I don't want to create dusting work for myself, but there is potential for a third shelf.

Another thing that was hard to draw was that I am envisioning my mug collection hanging on cup hooks under all of the shelves.  I can't wait to unpack that box!

Also when I say glassware, I just mean our regular every day glasses.  The wine glasses and probably some overflow regular glasses will go in the future dining room built-ins.



And here's a bonus, I was going through old pictures and found this one of the original hardwoods that are hidden under the nasty carpet.  I forgot how beautiful they are!  This is the floor in Bedroom #2.  Here's to hoping it is under the nasty stick-on kitchen floor.

Putting All The Things On The Walls

The posts this week are all delayed because on Sunday we were supposed to do two projects, but I took an epic nap instead.  Soooo there was nothing to write about Monday.  But last night we hung up All The Things so here we go:

The gallery wall is now finished!  Last week I printed two extra pictures at Costco and we stopped at Ikea for more frames.  Now they are up!  We ended up shifting the big picture in the middle up an inch to have a more balanced look.  I am working on plans for a console table on this wall.  It's just so hard to do wood working projects when your workshop is the garage and it's 5 degrees out.

Moving left around the room, here are some more honeymoon shots to the left of the Craft Room. They're three 5x7s that I thought looked good together hung in a Ribba frame from Ikea. 

Continuing left around the room, we put up three wedding photos to the left of the living room windows (and to the right of the coat hooks) and above the dog kennels.  I wanted them to have a different look than all the other frames in the room so I went with this beachy wood from Ikea (Jallvik frames).

It was really hard to narrow it down to three!  The one on the left was taken just after the ceremony by my brother, Tim, the one in the middle was taken during sunset in the middle of the reception by my brother-in-law Ian, and the one on the right was taken during the ceremony by my in-laws.  I love that one on the right because we are smiling at each other :)

And here is my splurge. Calendars are 50% at Paper Source because it's the end of February.  So I decided to have one tiny part of the kitchen that makes me happy, because I passionately hate our kitchen.

February isn't that great, but look at March, April, and beloved June!

Did you know that peonies were my original choice for my wedding bouquet?  But the flower shop said they're too unreliable and couldn't guarantee them looking good on the wedding day.  So I went with hydrangeas instead.  Now I wish I had ordered both and had the hydrangeas as back up. Oh well.

Another cool thing about this calendar that helped me feel like this wasn't a waste (because I don't really need a calendar), is that each month can be reused!  Depending on the month you can cut out file folders or note cards or gift boxes when it's over.  I think that's such a good idea!

My only other art hanging plans at the moment are in the bathroom.  Hopefully this weekend we will BUILD the frames and those posts should be up next week!

Easy DIY Bathroom Towel Hooks

Once we made the coat hooks both Corey & I wanted to use the extra scrap to make some hooks for the bathroom.  

Right now we just have one right by the shower and putting two towels on it is annoying.  Plus now we both have robes (which is very luxurious and I don't know why I waited so long to buy a white terrycloth robe.  Best random Ikea impulse purchase!) and there's no where to hang those either.

Since we ended up making the coat rack smaller than I had been planning we had four hooks leftover from that project which is the perfect amount for these bathroom hooks.

This was so easy to do because we didn't want the extra shelf on top.  So here's the step by step:

Step 1: Play around with measurements until you're happy and know how long you want your board to be

Step 2: Cut your board to the right length

Step 3: Route the edges to be fancy

Step 4: Stain or paint your piece

Step 5: If it's going in a bathroom you should put on a coat of polyurethane (omg I spelled that right on the first try!)

Step 6: Get your hooks where you want them and trace the hook and make marks for the screw holes

Step 7: Pre-drill the screw holes one hook at a time

Step 8: Use a screwdriver to carefully put in the screws.  Repeats steps 7 & 8 until all your hooks are in

Step 9: Since we have lathe and plaster walls we need to use toggle bolts (also called molly bolts) to hang things like this on the wall (it's very hard to find studs to screw into with the wood lathe boards in the way).  We used two to hold this up and strategically placed them to be behind the hooks.  We used a countersink bit so that the head of the screw would be flat under the hook plate.  Pre-drill the holes and countersink them.

Step 10: Screw in the toggle bolts. Corey did this alone while I was gone so there aren't any pictures of the process. See this post for more detailed pictures

Step 11: Put the hooks back on and voila the bolts are covered up and the hooks are held to the wall by magic!

Step 12:  Hang that shit uuuuuuup

Next up for the bathroom is making some DIY rustic picture frames for 4 mini-prints I have.  I want to hang then in a row above the towel hooks.

Art With Meaning

As I mentioned on Monday, when we put up the gallery wall we also hung up two other pieces of art while we were at it.  Both of those other pieces are very special to me.

One piece is over the buffet for now, but I think long-term it will go in our (future) master bedroom.  I think when we install the fireplace and mantle I want something bigger and more substantial over it.  

This piece has a fun story.  In college I took two art classes (they were of the how-to-teach-art variety).  And in one of them we had to paint a painting based off of a picture.  I decided to meld together two pictures I took in New Zealand, one of the beach and one of a beautiful sunset.  I am so happy with how the sunset looks because I really focused on it and my teacher helped me so much to get it to look just right.  Now looking at it I wish I had also focused more on the sand and water because I rushed those and in comparison they're not as good (the sand is way too orange and doesn't have enough texture).  Having this up on the wall really makes me want to start painting again because it is so much fun.  Though without a teacher's guidance it'll be much harder.

The other piece we hung above the doorway in the living room: 

This is a handmade wooden carving from Malaysia.  When I was on vacation in North Carolina a few years ago I saw a beautiful wooden carving hanging in a store and I really wanted to buy it.  I looked for some detail on it and saw it was from Malaysia.  Then I remembered that my dad was going to be taking a work trip there soon.  I knew if I could I'd prefer to get it directly from the source so the artist could make more money on the sale.  So I took a few pictures of it and gave my Dad a mission.  He ended up finding a beautiful carving very similar to the one I had seen in North Carolina. 

I love having this piece up now and I think of my Dad every time I look at it (it wasn't the easiest souvenir to bring home!).  And my by some miracle it matches the house's trim stain color so well and it looks very at home up there.

Hopefully we'll be hanging up more stuff this week!  I am on a major roll with getting stuff up on the walls.  The bare walls around this place are really getting to me.

Putting Up A Gallery Wall

In the Fall when my sister-in-law and I went to Ikea I bought 15 white frames because I knew I wanted to do a gallery of pictures we took on our honeymoon on this wall between the Craft Room and Bedroom #1.  Once I started planning this out I realized I needed 2 more so I picked them up at Ikea and printed 17 pictures.  But with the final arrangement we again need 2 more frames.  So I just put the order in at Costco and this week I am making another trip to Ikea for more frames.

It took me until February to pick the pictures and get them printed and up on the wall.  Only a four month wait which isn't too shabby.  The LED lighting kicked me into high gear.

I printed them at Costco and the prices were really reasonable.  I spent about $14 on all these pictures and $6 of that was just from the 3 big prints.  I just printed 5 more prints  today (3 are wedding pictures for a different wall) and it was only $2.50.

I just totaled up what I spent on frames at Ikea and with the two I am going to buy this week it totals $95.81 (plus tax) for 19 brand new frames.  So the total for art for this wall is about $120.  Not too bad!

I spent an evening getting them all in their frames:

The 3 big ones were tricky because the matting wasn't the right size for what I printed, but I didn't want no matting.  So I taped the picture to the front of the matting.  Here's what it looks like:

I flipped it over so you can see how small it would have been if I would have put it behind the matting:

They sat gathered up on the dining room table awaiting their hanging:

 

And just to show you how badly we need to reinforce our floors, as I was pacing for steps one night (I have a FitBit and shoot for 10,000 steps a day) the whole stack fell over and onto the floor.  The shaking floor shook the table and knocked over the stack!  Luckily nothing broke, there are just some chips that I need to touch up with some white paint.

I traced out all the frames on brown paper grocery bags, cut them up, and used painters tape to put them up on the wall.  The wall went through many iterations:

Then Corey took a crack at it (he loosened it up a bit which was hard for me to do with my symmetry issues) and we ended up with this lovely final arrangement:

Corey made a mark for the nail on the brown paper template and then drilled through the paper (I don't know why the one shot I got of him drilling doesn't have the paper there...) before hammering in the nail.  He pre-drilled the holes because of our lathe and plaster walls.

And here's a shot of Crater Lake without the glare:

Speaking of Crater Lake, maybe I should mentioned where we went on our honeymoon.  All of these shots were taken by either Corey or me while we were in the Pacific Northwest.  We flew into Seattle and rented a car and meandered our way down to San Francisco and flew out from there.  These shots were taken at one of these places: Seattle, Washington; Lake Quinault, Washington; Ruby Beach, Washington;  Mt. Rainier National Park, Washington; Crater Lake, Oregon; The Portland Rose Garden, Oregon; Council Crest Park, Oregon; Redwood Forest, California; and a random beach in California at sunset

The two extra that I printed are of another Washington wildflower and another shot of Ruby Beach.

My plans for the wall below the pictures is to have a little console table.  I am working on the plans to build one!

Stay tuned for more art going up on the walls!  We put up two more things the same day as this gallery wall and I have plans for four frames in the living room on other walls.  Plus we are working on art for the bathroom!