Yep.  That would be me.  Crazy, insane, kitchen-loving me.

Don’t get me wrong – we haven’t yet bought a house.  We’re still trying to decide between a couple of nearly-perfect properties that we’ve seen, while desperately hoping that a really-perfect property appears in the meantime and before we make an offer elsewhere.  We’ve seen quite a few houses at this point.  There’s been a bit of good, a lot of bad, and oodles of ugly.

And, the common ugly element with each house we’ve seen?  The kitchen.

Yep, that’s right.  Nearly every house we’ve seen has had what I like to affectionately refer to as a “scary kitchen.”  Be it because of filth, or due to wear and tear, or even just really really unsuccessful decorating attempts (for the record, mac-tac is not a good or lasting solution for hiding outdated countertops), I’ve seen a tonne of awful kitchens during our house-hunting rounds.

So, as a kitchen pick-me-up, let’s look at a few of my most recent lust-worthy Pinterest finds, k?  To cleanse my kitchen-looking palate, if you will.  To erase (or at least quasi-quash) the memories of all the bad that we’ve recently seen.

First, I’d like to officially declare my love for (fellow Canadian!) Sarah Richardson’s super pretty white and gray (with a wee bit of blue thrown in too!) kitchen…

See that ceiling?  Oh sighhhh.  I’d like that exact ceiling in my (next, yet to be purchased) kitchen, if you please.

And then there’s this one that apparently (according to Pinterest!) originates from a blog out of Sweden (I think!) called Allt i Hemmet (although I couldn’t find this actual image on their blog…  I’m sure it’s likely there somewhere though!)

I think I need a bunting-draped kitchen of my own.  So fun eh?  I love.  :)

There’s also this lovely mint specimen from Home Ideas Mag…

How absurdly pretty are those mint-painted cupboards?  Quite unexpected.  And quite awesome.

Lastly, there’s this one…

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Yep.  My own poor abandoned little 1940′s kitchen.  Oh how I miss it.  There was a whole lot of angst and nail biting and obsessing and hours upon hours of Pinterest-searches and Canadian Style At Home-reading and HGTV-watching that went into that tiny (but super functional!) kitchen.  And when it was finished, I was so pleased.  Oh how I miss that pretty little space.  [Ginormous sigh.]

So those are my most recent kitchen-lust-worthy finds.  It’s rather hard to make plans for your own kitchen prior to actually purchasing said kitchen, but I’m definitely doing my best (and, honestly, I really can’t help myself!)  Here’s hoping that I have a new kitchen of my own (that I can obsess about for real-sies) very very shortly.

But I now love my cute little kitchen.  The floors are no longer blue.  The countertop is all sparkly and clean, and I finally got my double sink.  I adore the Stonington Gray-painted walls, and my fresh clean-looking Snowfall White cabinets.  Plus all the other little things I did to make our kitchen feel like “us.”  I worked hard to make it pretty!  It’s now my happy place – many batches of brownies and cookies and other yummy things (made for the people I love) have emerged from this room.  And it’s where Sweetie and I convene each night after work, discussing our days while sitting across from one another at the island.

Let’s reminisce just a little, k?

Here’s where we started (image courtesy of the original house listing, not me!) with an ugly and rather greasy chair rail, ridiculous light fixtures, dirty cream coloured cabinets, strange gray trim, and a blue peel and stick floor…

Sweetie removed the rather random chair rail, and I painted the dickens out of my wee kitchen and we swapped out all the hardware and the obnoxious light fixtures, leaving us with this…

…which we lived with for quite a while (while I crazily stalked other people’s kitchens and planned and planned and planned some more.)

Then – happy day! – I laid a new kitchen floor.  Best.  Day.  Ever.

…and then (then!) we added new countertops and the fancy new double sink. Leaving us with our current happy (and pretty!) little kitchen…

Happy sigh.  :)

If we were planning to stay in the house longer, I would have put in a backsplash, probably in marble of some sort.  I’ve always adored FrecklesChick‘s lovely little kitchen, and I think a similar tile backsplash would have looked snazzy here.

But perhaps we’ll save all that for the next house.  :)  While I’m hoping that our next kitchen won’t be quite as disasterous as this one was when we moved in, we tend to buy houses with ugly kitchens.  It seems to be our (not at all intentional) “thing.”

So, just to recap (because I love a good Grand Finale!), this…

…became this…

…and this…

…turned into this…

Better eh?  I’d say that’s definite progress.  Here’s hoping the next family who lives in this house loves this little kitchen as much as I do!

And here’s looking forward to having a new kitchen to obsess about and pretty-up at our next home, wherever that may be.  Although I could really do without a blue floor this time.  (Just saying.)

It’s not pretty.

We installed our new laminate countertop last weekend.  It was a rather traumatic endeavor.  Don’t worry – Sweetie and I are ok, we’re still married, and we still have all of our fingers and toes.  But my kitchen?

Sigh.

Let’s start from the beginning, k?

Here’s the before…

And look…

Yep!  That’s my dish rack.  Bet you’ve never seen that in any of my kitchen pics eh?  That’s because I normally hide it away before taking any pictures of my kitchen.  Nothing screams “Look!  We have a single sink and no dishwasher!” like a big ol’ white dish rack.  But because I was documenting our final single-sink day, I thought I’d leave the dish rack sitting out.  Just once.  :)

As soon as I was done snapping some final BEFORE pics (because I’m a little insane like that) Sweetie started tearing things apart while I ran out to Home Depot (for the third time in 24 hours) for yet another somethingmerother that we needed.  When I returned, the old countertop was gone, and the kitchen looked like this…

Ack eh?  Ack indeed.

We then grabbed the new slab of countertop.  It seemed like a pretty simple concept: remove old countertop, add new countertop, enjoy new countertop.  Unfortunately, despite some very careful measuring and re-measuring pre-new-countertop order, the new top didn’t fit.  At all.  We wiggled it, we tried turning it, we attempted some fancy coordinated countertop maneuvering.  It was a definite no-go.  Our mistake: little 1940s houses don’t have square walls.  They also have window ledges that I’m convinced were specifically installed to thwart countertop replacement projects.

So out came the circular saw.

We employed the less-is-more strategy with the saw (since despite having the power to easily make the countertop shorter, it’d be super a fancy trick to make it longer again if we took too much off.)  Cut number one was still too long.  Cut number two was closer.  And with each cut we’d haul the slab of laminate through the house into the back yard, then lug the ever so slightly shorter slab back in, all the while trying desperately not to chip the corners and edges.

Then came cut number three.  It fit!  But it fit a little too well.

(Those are my snazzy zebra print slippers btw.  Cute eh?  They were part of a Christmas gift basket from my very lovely and amazing friend Jess who blogs over at Little Townhome Love.  And, coincidentally, whose birthday is today!  HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESS!  Love you!)  (And our walls, for the record, are not purple.  All that purple-ishness is likely reflecting off of my very pink hoodie.)  (Note to self: always remove pink hoodie before taking pictures for blog.)

(But I digress…)

Yep.  Once we finally cut enough off to fit the countertop into place beyond the evil too-long window ledge and the stubborn 1940s-carpentry-gone-awry bowed out wall, I was left with a ginormous gap at the most often used and most easily viewed end of the countertop.

I cried.  It’s true.

So out came Sweetie’s belt sander.

You see, we couldn’t just leave it like this.  There was no way to fill in that gap with caulking (my normal go-to fix-all solution.)  So Sweetie decided that we’d sand down the high spot on the countertop to make it fit more flush with the bowed out wall.  This meant that the gap on the other side would get even larger, but the other side of the countertop, being the less often used and less obvious side, could handle it.

The risk paid off.  Hooray for power tools.  Hooray for Sweetie.  :)

A full day of plumbing fun followed.  I’ll spare you the grizzly details.  There was swearing and cursing and a whole lot of water coming from places it should not.  Suffice it to say that Sweetie is definitely an electrician – a plumber he will never be.  The Coles Notes visual version looks like this…

Irwin even got a bit of a plumbing lesson.  For the record, cats sorta suck at plumbing.

But, after everything was cleaned up and sealed and leak-tested and shined up, we had this…

Pretty eh?  New countertop.  New double sink.  Who needs a dish rack?  For the first time in two and a half years, not me.  :)

I still have a gazillion touch ups to do (we took some rather good-sized chunks out of the wall while trying to wiggle the new countertop into place, and the old countertop definitely sat lower than this one so I’ve got to do a bit of painting above the backsplash.)  Oh, and see that big hole under the sink?

That’s where we had a bit of an oopsie with a big drill bit (patching definitely required there too.)  And a cabinet door randomly fell off at some point during this whole experiment…

…so that should probably go back on eventually too.

But the countertop is in!  Yay!  And it’s awesome.  And I’m a very happy girl.

The moral of this tale?  Unless you’re a skilled carpenter, have walls that are perfectly square, or are just really really lucky when it comes to these sorts of DIY things, hire someone for countertop replacement.  Really.  I didn’t at all enjoy this project, and I’m still not 100% thrilled with the end result.  But it’s done.  And hopefully prospective home buyers just won’t look too closely at our workmanship.

And they all lived happily ever after.  The end.  Ish.  :)

DONE.

Here’s the progression (for anyone who’s visual, like me.)

I started with this…

…which (thankfully!) turned into this…

…Sweetie then added quarter round, which looked like this…

…then I caulked and painted everything, leaving a sparkly new (and finished) (and not blue) kitchen floor, that looks like this…

Am I happy much?  YES.  Have a already christened my new floor with a silly little happy dance?  Of course.  Does this occasion call for a big bottle of wine?  Absolutely.

(Although pretty much any occasion is a good excuse for wine, if you ask me.)

One more thing done off our big ol’ to-do pre-listing list.  And one major item completed from the list of things I’ve been meaning to do since we moved into this humble little abode 2.5 years ago.

Progress, how ever slow, is still progress.  :)

And it’s not blue.

And there are no giant ugly gouges marring its loveliness.

And it looks clean and fresh and sparkly and new.  :)

See?

Sigh.  Yep.  I’m a happy girl.  Despite taking nearly THREE whole afternoons to lay (Dear Allure flooring folk: while I adore your product, it’s not necessarily as easily installed as you claim for those of us who are a tad OCD and really want all the seams to line up all nice and neat and such) and despite that it’s not my much adored hickory-look floor (oh, how I wanted that hickory-look floor!) it’s still way better than the 1980′s era flooring-monstrosity that hides underneath.

And, most importantly, it’s not blue.

Should we do a quick Before and After?  Likely.  Just because I’m super ridiculously proud like that.

The rather depressing BEFORE (with ugly 1980′s peel and stick blue tiles and a whole lot of ickiness)…

AFTER (pretty and clean and NOT BLUE)…

What’s that you say?  Why yes – that IS a pretty new yellow tea towel (thank you for noticing!)  I’m quite sure that Galen over at President’s Choice made that specifically for me because he knew yellow would look nice with my amazing new floor (and I think he was right.)

And see that bowl of lemons?  Yep.  That’s me practicing my fancy-pants house-staging tactics.  Snazzy eh?  Because I would never randomly just leave a bowl of fruit sitting out on my counter like that (since, well, I don’t eat much fruit, and it’d likely be all moldy and gross by the time I actually remembered it’s there.  Which would make me sad.)  (Unless we’re talking bananas here.  Bananas are always a countertop fruit.  But they don’t look nearly as pretty as lemons do in a bowl.)

So what’s missing?  Quarter round.  That goes on next (thanks to Sweetie’s stellar carpentry skills.)  And then the floor drama will officially be over.  Forever.  Hooray!  Tada!

Or at least until the next house.  (Teehee.)

That there is my new kitchen floor going down.  Finally.  Fiiiiiiiinally.  (Insert big huge ridiculously silly happy dance HERE.)  It’s amazing how the rush to get your house listed for spring (aka prime house-selling season) will suddenly move any much-deliberated but never-initiated projects into fast-forward mode.  Yep – two and a half years of griping about our ugly kitchen floor (and much ongoing debate over what to replace it with) later, and we’re finally making ‘er pretty.

Progress rocks.  :)

Sweetie removed all the quarter round for me last weekend…

And then I patched the icky holes in the old peel and stick tiles…

And then floor-laying officially began!  I started yesterday with this…

Which then grew into this…

And then eventually became this (much later in the day and under ugly artificial light)…

I finally called it a night when I had enough flooring down that I could move the appliances back into place.

If you’ve been following my (ongoing) floor drama at all, you might notice that this isn’t the floor I originally wanted.  Like, at all.  I had big lovely hickory-look flooring plans.  However all that quickly changed when I found a batch of flooring on clearance.  Yep – I went cheap and cheerful on my resale-bound floor.  Regularly $47 per box (with each box covering 24 square feet) I found four boxes of this particular floor (Allure’s Resilient Flooring in Patina) in Home Depot’s clearance pile for $30 each.  And even after supplementing my clearance boxes with one additional box at full price (since four boxes would have given me exactly enough to do the floor without any extra for errors or weird cuts or things like that) the whole floor will cost about $170 in the end (plus a whole lot of elbow grease), which seems pretty darn reasonable, if you ask me!  It’s not exactly what I wanted (and if we were planning to stay in this house, I would have committed to my beloved, but pricier, hickory-look floor) but for resale?  It’ll do.  :)

Assuming I give it a good solid effort, I’ll likely (hopefully!) have the rest of the floor down today.  While it’s not quite as easy to put down as the good folk at Allure would like you to believe, it’s not particularly difficult either.  It’s just time consuming.  And a little finicky when it comes to making sure the seams are all tight.

Looking very (very!) forward to finally (finally!!!) checking “make kitchen floor look much much prettier and way less blue” off my to-do list.  Next pre-listing project in line: countertops.  :)

But then Ms Stager (who, despite my grumblings, was really really nice) turned to our kitchen.  And, of course, she scowled a little while she looked at our floor and counters.  At which point, to put her obviously distressed mind at ease, I proudly brought out my little floor sample (Allure Trafficmaster flooring in Hickory), and my chosen countertop sample too (Formica’s pretty Ivory Kashmire), and waited for her approval to rain over us for a second time.

Her approval did not come.  In fact, she poo-poo-ed my countertop choice, saying it wasn’t gray enough or dark enough or something equally disappointing.  We needed something with more grays or something slate-y, she said, to go with all the grays in our kitchen and living room.  We could install my beloved Ivory Kashmire granite-look Formica in our next house, she quipped, but here?  Here we needed to work on resale.

I won’t lie: my heart broke into a gazillion pieces.  For anyone who knows me well, I’m decision-dysfunctional.  Committing to anything is a long and tedious process, normally involving hours upon hours of research and debate over various options and careful weighing of pros and cons and alternatives.

Yep.  Ms Stager told me that, despite my careful consideration, I had chosen wrong.

Sigh.  I was sad.

So I wandered back to the drawing board with her tips fresh in my head.  I visited all the big box home stores in our area for ideas and inspiration.  And, after much deliberation, here’s what I’ve come up with…

…our same Allure flooring choice in Hickory (just because I love it so much, and also because it should be easy for me to put down on my own some day while Sweetie is at work) and Jamocha Granite laminate countertops from Formica.  It’s not EXACTLY what I wanted for my pretty little kitchen, but it could work.  And I think it could even, possibly, look really nice.  Perhaps Ms Stager was right.

So, there’s your update on where things are so far!  How fitting to find ourselves once again standing in the kitchen, trying to make decisions.  Hopefully this time we’ve got it right.  :)

The floor is its own separate debate (that I’ve already chatted about HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE just a little HERE too.)  The floor is indeed hideous, and soon needs to be replaced (sadly, teal-coloured 1980′s peel and stick tiles just aren’t my thing.)

But almost equally offensive are my old laminate countertops.  They’re warped.  They’re chipped.  They’re scorched in a couple of places.  They’re, um, blue.  From a distance they don’t look completely awful…

But once you get a little closer, the years of wear and tear (and overall blue-ness) becomes a little more apparent…

Yep.  Kinda gross.

In a perfect, countertop-abundant world, I would adore new Corian or Caesarstone countertops, or some other sort of composite material.  Similarly, granite would be fantastic.  And marble would be positively lovely!  Unfortunately my (rather frugal) bank account has a bit of a say in the matter, and is dictating my choices just a little.

I’ve always lived with laminate countertops.  My mom had them in our house growing up (and recently replaced her old laminate countertops with gorgeous new granite-look laminate counters.)  Every apartment and house I’ve lived in since (including this one obviously) has also had laminate counters.  And I DO like them – untrendy as they may be, they’re rather easy to care for (no sealing, no worrying about standing water or red wine…  install, and enjoy.  Simple!)  Of course I’d absolutely prefer a snazzy natural stone or one of the new composites (oh, Misty Carrera Caesarstone, how beautiful you are!) but from a financial and practicality standpoint, laminate is a far more appealing option.

And, all that said, I HAVE found a laminate option that I think I could live with.  It’s a granite-y laminate called Ivory Kashmire, and it’s made by those fine folk over at Formica.  On the tiny little chip I nabbed from Home Depot, it looks like this…

Which, I’m hoping in my kitchen, would look a bit like this (from the Lettered Cottage)…

Or like this (from Made By Girl)…

Pretty eh?  :)

My other option would be the super trendy (and lovely!) butchers block countertops.  Butchers blocks seem to require considerably more care than laminate counters.  There’s the sealing.  And the oiling.  And more oiling.  And the paranoia regarding standing water.  And the oiling.  And while treating wooden countertops once every few months doesn’t sound like a huge undertaking, I’ll forget.  Guaranteed.  And Sweetie will forget to wipe up water splashes.  Also guaranteed.  And then I’ll end up with watermarks or cracking or whatever normally happens to shamefully neglected butchers block countertops.  And then I’ll be sad.

But, they’re SO NICE.  See?  I want my kitchen to look like this (from the Marian House Book)…

…or like this (from the Mustard Ceiling)…

Love!

I may, in the end, very well end up with both in my kitchen – laminate on the countertops around my cupboards/sink, and butchers block on the island (where its much less likely to come into contact with water, and could look lovely leading into my living room!)  Time will tell.  Until then, I’ll likely continue to obsess over both.

Because that’s what I do.  It makes me sound a little crazy (but, in truth, it’s sorta fun.)

Even my newly acquired little driftwood star got Christmassied up a wee bit…

Yup.  We’re all getting in the spirit around here.  (Pictures of cats wearing tiny little reindeer antlers to follow shortly, of course.)

I’ve now lived with my DIY kitchen art attempt for a week now, and I’m still not loving it.  At all.  :(  I’ve decided that it’s the blue “inner-matting” (I should seriously coin that term, eh?) that’s throwing everything off.  Yep – the blue is making me… well, blue.

So I delved deep into my scrapbook paper pile once again, and pulled out a sheet of lovely Christmassy red paper.  And squealed just a little.  Because that’s what I do.  (Kinda freaks the cats out a bit, but it keeps them on their toes.)

And after a few minutes of cut and paste (I’m president of the International Society of Cutters and Pasters, btw), I had this…

Which looks like this on my wall…

Which makes me a very happy girl.  :)

So am I done with this project now?  Probably.  I mean, I could be really rather persnickety and say that the red is a little more tomato-ey than I’d prefer (which, really, is quite true.)  But it’s BETTER.  Much better.  And I have a gazillion other fun projects I’m just itching to start.  (Do you see that as foreshadowing?  Let’s call that foreshadowing.  :)

Happy one month (less a day!) till Christmas!  Hooray!  Bring on the merry!

I love her.  She’s classy (there’s french writing on that print – doesn’t that automatically make her sophisticated?), and, well, she’s hanging out with several cats (which makes her pretty darn cool in my books.)  It’s perfect.  :)

But…  I’ve been feeling the need to switch things up a bit lately.  While I love my crazy French cat lady, I’ve been feeling the need for more colour.  More oooomph, if you will.  A little cheer and a lot of joy perhaps.  So, with Christmas coming (and the gazillion free printables floating around Pinterest) I decided to make the switch.  For the holidays at least.  And then I’ll revisit my “art above the stove” dilemma again in January.  (Stay tuned for another post on that in about 40 days.)

It didn’t take me long to find this…

…courtesy of the lovely ladies over at Eighteen25.

And it didn’t take me long to decide that it’s perfect for my little kitchen. :)

The only problem?  Our printer, being a non-fancy-pants little machine, prints 8.5×11″ pages.  It’s not a high-end printer by any means, and it maxes out at a standard papersize.  Downsizing the original 16×20″ print to fit my tinier paper wasn’t a huge problem.  However the matting in my frame was for my lovely 11×14″ cat lady.

My “use whatcha got” solution?  Leftover scraps of scrapbook paper from other random past project.

Yup.  I pieced together what I’ll call an “inner-matting” (technical term) using some sparkly blue scrapbook paper pieces I had leftover from some other random DIY project.  For the record, I’m not a scrapbooker.  But I love scrapbooking stuff.  Paper and punches and pretty things…  It all makes me swoon, just a bit.

And, when I was done my little project (I excelled at cut-and-paste as a toddler, btw), I was left with this…

Insert semi-frowny face HERE.  The big reveal was most definitely a colon-S sorta moment.  :S  I’m undecided.  It needs… something more.  Like some red ribbon or some doodads or something like that (maybe there is in fact a little closet scrapbooker buried somewhere deep inside of me afterall.)  Or perhaps it’s the blue paper that’s throwing me off.  While I love the blue with the print, it’s just not playing nice with the gray on my walls.

So let’s consider this a 4 out of 10 for now, k?  To be revisited again shortly.  I have some deep red scrapbook paper kicking around somewhere in my scrapbook paper basket (yes, I have a designated container for pretty papers…  don’t tell…) that I’m guessing will likely be the solution to all my kitchen print woes.  Yep, there may indeed be a second “inner-matting” cut and paste project extraordinaire coming to a kitchen island near me.

Are you excited?  Me too.  :)

To be continued…