Blue cabinetry lust (pretty pretty pretty!)
I adore Samantha Pynn. I really do. Call it a bit of a designer-crush, but I think she’s amazing, and super talented, and I love everything she does. (And, she’s a fellow Canadian to boot!)
So imagine my delight when she posted pictures of this kitchen in her regular National Post column…
And imagine all the swooning (from me) that followed shortly thereafter. That blue – it’s perfect! That marble (or a close lookalike!) countertop – how lovely. The whole kitchen screams the word “fresh!” I seriously want to cook in there.
And now I’m seriously rethinking my kitchen plans.
Our kitchen currently features cream-coloured cabinets on the uppers, with dark navy lower cabinets. I didn’t paint these (the house came like this) and while the two-toned look has grown on me, I’ve always found the combination a little dated and dark (despite that two-toned cabinets seem to be very in style right now!)
I’ve always planned to repaint both the uppers and lower cupboards in a crisp off-white, Benjamin Moore’s Snowfall White, to be exact. We painted our last kitchen’s cupboards this colour, and it was the perfect bright white, with just a hint of creaminess to take away any overt starkness. It was lovely, and made me very very happy.
But now I’m changing my mind just a little. The upper cabinets will still get a good-sized dose of Snowfall White, of course (since the existing cream-colour is just so… dark) (if cream can be dark? I think it can…) but I’m now second-guessing my bottom-cupboard intentions. How pretty would a little electric-ish blue be? My answer? VERY.
We’ll see just how brave I’m feeling come kitchen-painting time. I’m a bit of a kitchen cupboard painting chicken, truth be told. Kitchen cupboards take a long time to paint, so it’s one of those tasks where I’ve always returned to my safety-zone hues (since I can’t imagine having to repaint all my kitchen cupboards for a second time.)
Here’s hoping that kitchen-painting time comes soon! Only 743 other projects to finish up first….
Leave a comment
Admissions of a mint-loving maniac (and plans for my next purdy little kitchen)
Admission #1: I am obsessed with teal/mint/teal-ish-mint/teal-y-blue-ey-mint/anything in that whole awesome and spectacular colour family at the moment.
Admission #2: I have ginormous plans to either…
a) paint my kitchen cupboards with the fabulous above mentioned teal/mint/somewhat teal-tinted-mint-based hue (if I’m feeling particularly adventurous and brave – painting kitchen cupboards takes A WHOLE LOT of work, so it’s quite a crazy project and not at all for the colour-fearing commitment-phobe)
OR
b) paint my kitchen walls teal/mint/teal-y-mint should I chicken out of my bold kitchen cupboard painting plans and opt for the more low-risk option.
Admission #3: I don’t yet own the aforementioned kitchen with its not yet painted cupboards and/or walls but I will very very shortly – only FOUR weeks (plus a few days) to go! Until then, in true (likely predictable) Melissa fashion, I will obsess endlessly and scour Pinterest for loveliness. (I’m a little lot OCD like that.)
So, in lieu of actually having an actual real-life kitchen to paint at present (holy moly I can’t wait to have to have my own little kitchen again!) and in light of the fact that I’m a little obsessed with paint colours at the moment, here are a few of my favourite marvellous quasi-teal/mint/absolutely lovely kitchens…
Triangle Honeymoon (whose site seems to be down at the moment) (which makes me super sad – there’s a whole lot of awesomeness there!) painted their kitchen in Glidden’s Gentle Tide…
Looks so perfect with the butcher’s block countertops, no?
And take a look at Brenda over at Cottage4C’s (bravely!) painted kitchen cupboards…
The colour (Sherwin Williams Rain) is a tad more blue-ish than minty-ish, and I love it. So pretty!
Our little loo at the last house was painted in Benjamin Moore’s Woodlawn Blue, but I think it’d be super pretty in a kitchen with white accents and such (like this one from Darryl Carter)…
Lastly (but most definitely not leastly) is this teal/green/slightly-minty-I-suppose (but definitely lovely!) kitchen courtesy of House of Turquoise…
Oh, swoon. I absolutely adore this kitchen! So much so that I think we should see another pic (don’t you?)
(I’m still swooning over here.) The colour is so fantastically cheery, but not obnoxiously so (since, well, I can only stand so much cheeriness pre-coffee in the morning.) And with pretty yellow accents it just looks so… fresh. Like a cucumber I suppose. Or a big head of iceberg lettuce. Both of which, appropriately enough, belong in a kitchen. So perhaps Kensington Green belongs in my kitchen…
And perhaps I should make a salad.
(As soon as I officially own my kitchen that is.) (Only four weeks plus five days to go!)
Leave a comment
One last project (because nothing says “Welcome to your new home!” like a freshly painted porch)
In a rather shocking turn of events, my front porch finally got its facelift. Poof! It was a last minute pre-listing omg-the-porch-looks-like-crap kind of moment that spawned this project. I woke up on Monday morning, opened the door so the cats could look outside through the screen, and declared (to my cats – now that I’m home by myself every day we chat quite a bit) (yep – I’m that crazy cat lady who has full conversations with her cats) that it was a porch painting sorta day.
And it looks so much better.
Truth be told, I had really good porch-painting intentions all last summer and fall, but my painting plans were constantly thwarted by rainy-forecasts and too-hot days. Selling (and a string of lovely-spring-weather days) was the kick in the tooshy I needed to get this project done.
Here’s the really ugly before (-ish – I forgot to take a real before shot, so this was a couple hours into painting) (but it still shows just how awful-looking my wee little porch had gotten):
(See the little furry faces peeking through the screen door? I had quite the porch painting audience.)
After!
So. Much. Better. Eh? I went with paint rather than stain – staining (according to the nice lady at my local Benjamin Moore store) would have required sanding. I don’t like sanding. And that all seemed like a lot of work. However paint, she said, could just be plopped right on top of the old finish. Given that this was one of a gazillion projects I had on the go, I was sold. The colour I bravely chose (since exterior house colour choosing is hard!) is Benjamin Moore’s Stampede. It seems to match some of the little stones that live in our brick.
Sweetie removed the sad-looking (and, well, dead) bushes that sat in front of the house and planted those tiiiny and rather adorable globe cedars for me. They’ll get bigger. Eventually. And they need a bit more mulch and my front flowerbeds in general need a lot more love. But, in the meantime, I think those little green balls of cedarness are pretty darn cute.
And my front bench got a little fancying up too with a pretty new pillow and a potted yellow gerbera daisy…
It screams “Buy me! Buy me! You could sip wine here!” no? Hoping so!
All in all, porch painting was not fun. It took me two days (I thought it would take a couple hours) and three quarts of paint (I figured it would take one.) But I’m pretty sure it was a worthwhile effort. Here’s hoping a bit of curb appeal will go a long way in enticing house shoppers to fall in love with our happy little home. :)
Leave a comment
It’s always darkest before the dawn (a tour of our pretty painted/primped bedroom) (and an examination of my newly unemployed state)
I’ve been a bit unintentionally MIA for the past couple of weeks. In all honesty, the last-week-of-workness, trying-to-get-house-ready-to-list-ishness, OMG-need-to-find-another-job-soon-ness, and all of the related stress took its toll on me last week and I sorta just wanted to curl up in a corner and sleep for a bit.
But all that is over now. Work is done, for better or for worse. I’m applying for jobs like crazy and hoping that a promising phone call from some nice prospective employer-person (who thinks I’m awesome and wants to pay me loads of money to come work at their fine organization) comes soon. We’re working on the house and have been in talks with our agent so we can list as soon as possible. And we’re looking at other houses and trying to make smart and solid plans for what to do next.
But, in the midst of all this chaos, I realized that I never posted my “look-what-we-did!” big reveal on our bedroom makeover. So I thought I’d take a bit of a timeout from everything else and indulge in a quick “tada!” moment. :)
First, let’s take a looksee back on what the room looked like pre-painting/-primping/-improving, k? Our room wasn’t terrible. At all! But I’m not a sage green kind of girl – I’d like to be, and I like it in other people’s homes, but it’s just not me.
A couple coats of BM Revere Pewter later (plus a pretty pendant light, a much-obsessed-about new duvet cover and some new curtains too) and here’s our lovely little bedroom now (on a mighty sunny day!)…
I’m particularly happy with our curtains (Matilda from the awesome curtain-making folk over in Ikea-land.) Cheap and cheerful and sorta girly but simple.
And I’m also in love with our duvet cover. Also cheap. Also cheerful. Also Ikea (Alvine Orter.)
For now I’ve tossed (er, lovingly and carefully placed) a random navy and red striped Roots blanket that I’ve had for eons at the foot of the bed. Once spring hits (weather-wise at least!) I’ll likely swap the heavy blanket out for a lighter throw. But for the time being, it works. :)
And I’m ridiculously pleased by how nice our freshly painted walls look against our awesome black-brown Hemnes dressers. I’ve been wanting to paint a room (a wall? A random piece of furniture? Anything!) Revere Pewter for years. Mr. Benjamin Moore? You did not disappoint!
So there’s your mini bedroom makeover update! There are still a few additional plans in the works. New colourful pillowcases, and maybe a few throw cushions too, to make the head of the bed a bit prettier. Snazzy new bedside lamps perhaps. Maybe even a new nighttable for Sweetie (since the nighttable cleverly and deliberately hidden on his side of the bed is archaic and rather awful looking.) If you look really closely, the ugly nightstand (and ugly lamp and one uninspiringly beige pillow) sneakily snuck into the corner of this pic…
Silly photo-bombing pillow! Updates on further updates to follow. :)
But for now, Jacob is a really big fan of what we’ve accomplished to date. So much so that he refused to leave the room (or, really, the bed) while I wandered around taking pics (hence some of the somewhat wonky angles in these images – I was working around a rather stubborn cat.) But, really, how could I say no to this little orange face?
Yup. Jacob knows exactly how to get his way with his cat-loving fur-friendly mom. Smart boy.
Leave a comment
Lions and zebras and giraffes (oh my!) (it’s a bit like a Toto song in here…)
Have I ever mentioned that we have not one, but TWO bedrooms in this house? Shocking, I know! The second bedroom sits directly across the tiny little hallway from our master-ish bedroom (“master-ish” because at about 10×10′ it’s hardly grandiose.) And this second bedroom is where we hide stuff. (True story.) A desk, our filing cabinet, a couple of storage chests, random boxes that we still haven’t emptied since the move (um, like, 2+ years ago…) I leave the door closed 95% of the time because I can’t handle looking at the mess. Why don’t we use this bedroom for something substantial (like an office or a guest room or some sort of similarly dignified purpose?) Afterall, our house IS rather tiny, so you’d think we’d put the room to good, functional use, right?
Look…
Yup. Lookout Tarzan, we’ve entered a happy little jungle!
The people who owned this house before us used this room as their nursery (obviously.) And, truth be told, I’m hoping that one day it might possibly be our nursery too. And, because of that, I can’t bear to paint over the rather cheery-looking animals that someone carefully and lovingly painted on the walls.
Are jungle animals my thing? Um, no. And even when this does become our nursery some day, the animals will likely get traded in for a far more subdued colour palette (since it’s rather glaringly bright in this room, and I’m more of a muted grays kinda gal.) But, until then, I don’t have the heart to ruthlessly paint over those happy little faces.
Especially the giraffe. He makes me smile. :)
Leave a comment