A Kitchen: The Begining

When it comes to home décor and style I have to admit that I am all over the map. Each room in our house has its own unique personality. Well all but one; my kitchen. It has taken a while to tell me exactly what its personality is. Part of this reason is because of my loathing for the color of the cabinets (which is this really dark “wood”). Even if we had the funds to change them we still couldn’t due to the fact that we are renting.

This really is a nice kitchen, just don't like dark wood.

See how dark they are?! I have been trying to force my kitchen into a “Tuscan” kind of look. And when I say force I mean force. I bought the kitchen towels, pot holders, and coasters that have pictures of wine bottles and grapes on them. The Lovely Husband found me a clock that matched them. I used to have the matching burner covers also. See the pattern here? Everything was matchy-matchy. My kitchen was starting to look like an ad in the Target flier.

Recently though my kitchen has finally started speaking. A few items have helped it find its voice, they are: copper Jell-O molds, my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, and fabric.

Nice and shiny! I NEED more!

Isn't it lovely? I think it's completely lovely!

Not pink and no cupcakes. I swear I picked this on my own.

A while ago I had The Lovely Husband hang up 5 copper Jell-O molds. Ever since then I have wanted to get more molds to hang up. This was the first whisperings from my kitchen.

The second whispering came to me after my father got me an early birthday present this year. A couple months ago I was surprised by my dad with a Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Anyone who bakes will understand my absolute excitement over this gift.

After I had my mixer for a little while I decided that I wanted to make a cover for it. I do enjoy having my mixer on display but I have two young boys and their legos are everywhere. I didn’t want to have to check the mixer bowl for legos before I went to use it each time.

After Goggling “stand mixer covers” I found a tutorial with a free pattern and planned a trip to my local Joann’s. I walked in wanting pink and cupcakes and walked out with the above pictured print and a nice brown to match. I put the cover together, placed it over my mixer and stood back to admire my work. It was then that my kitchen screamed at me “Why do I to have a theme? Can’t I just be a warm, inviting, loving kitchen?”

I agree with my kitchen. Not ever room needs to have a theme. So I am going to let my kitchen be just want it wants to be. I will update as it comes together.

See now the mixer is all nice and cozy; And Lego free!

New to us

For a while now I have been asking The Lovely Husband for a new dining room table. I went online and start pricing them and was blown away at the price! Really?! I thought that it was going to be a while before I got my new table.

Then came the garage clean-out and reorganization. The Lovely Husband was asking me what we could get rid of and what we were going to keep when I noticed the old table that we had been given a couple years ago that we had used as a desk/sewing table. The picture below shows how the table used to look. It had this somewhat nice golden stain color but was kinda ashy. 

(Obviously my son needed to be extremely close to the computer screen)

I knew this was the table I wanted to use for our dining room but it was kinda beat up and not in that shabby chic good way. I asked The Lovely Husband if he thought that it could be refinished. He said he would see what he could do.

Well a lot of sanding, new stain and a couple coats of semi gloss poly later this is what it looks like now.

(Honestly these pictures don't do this table justice.)

Isn't it just amazing? I love the color, it is this gorgeous shade of golden red. For only the cost of the stain and the poly finish I got a new dining room table. All I need now are some new chairs that The Lovely Husband can finish to match the table, oh and a really neat centerpiece. Anyone have any good ideas? And since we have stain and poly finish left The Lovely Husband is refinishing his dresser.


See there was no need to drop a lot of money on a table from the store. Check out a thrift store, Goodwill, local garage sale, etc. Find one that is the correct size and shape and spend a weekend refinishing it. I guarantee that you will value it more than something purchase from a store. I know I do!

And we're back.........

Why yes it has been a long time since I last blogged. I had a plan to blog at least once a week; well you know what they say about best laid plans. And that is what happened; life put me in its crosshairs and gave me its best shot. 

But now that I have the time I am getting back at this blog. Much progress has been made on our purge and organization front.

• The garage is almost done. We went through everything and were very critical with everything. One trip has already been made to Goodwill with one more trip in the works. Some of the stuff has been given to a few people at the office were The Lovely Husband works and the rest that we kept has been put up in the attic. Just need to re-arrange up there. We have mapped out where the chest freezer and extra fridge will be going and have made sure that the electrical in the garage can handle it.
• My recipe organization is taking longer than I first guessed it would. I have now located all of my loose paper recipes that I had lying around the house and boy do I have a ton. The transcribing is going to take longer than I thought but if I can get a few done each day than I count that as a win.
• Progress has been made on the closets. The main part has been going through boxes of paper, sorting them, getting rid of the garbage and filing what is left.
• Our landlord has painted both of the kids’ bedrooms and has hung all new doors throughout the townhouse. Our bedroom is next to be painted but first there is some water damage that needs to be repaired in the closet.

And there you are now all caught up with that front. On other fronts I have only 2 more semesters left in school. Come this fall both boys will be in school.

I can’t promise how often I will be able to blog, but I will do my best. I will be doing posts about the continued purging and organizing, posts about what I am doing to help better manage my household, fun that we have as a family, and so forth.

Of Pauses and Progress...........

Well the purging has stymied for now. The two closets I want to tackle next I need the lovely husband’s help with. But until he has time to help (he works a ton of hours during the week) I will be working on smaller projects around the house.

The first one is organizing my recipes. Over the years I have collected many cookbooks but also loose paper type of recipes. The cookbooks are fine; they have a nice little home on my kitchen counter in a corner. It is the loose paper ones that are spilling out everywhere, adding to our paper problem, and just making my cookbook area look untidy. I have wanted to do a recipe card box for a while but didn’t want to do just plain 3x5 cards; it’s just a thing with me that everything has to be girly and cute if I can make it that way. The other day I went to Michael’s craft store to just look around and happened to find these really cute, completely kitsch recipe cards. I found these in the $1 bins; there is also a recipe card box that I will be going back for. So now I am sorting though all of the loose paper recipes to make sure that I don’t have doubles and then will be hand writing them onto these cards. So instead of stacks of paper on top of my cookbooks I will have a cute box that can have its own home on the counter or in a cupboard.

 The other “small” project is my sewing stuff. I have a lot of fabric and other notions for sewing and right now they are scattered though out the house and long term storage. My goal end for this stuff is to have it all in one place and only have out what I need for whatever sewing projecting I am working on. Since we have a smallish townhouse and our want to reduce any type of clutter I will be storing everything in air tight Rubbermaid containers in the garage attic. This will entail me to have to sort through everything and get it better organized and the containers labeled.

There has been some progress made on the garage. We (the lovely husband and I) are waiting for a nice cool day to get to work on it. Pulling out what is garbage, what can go into a yard sale and what we are planning to keep. We also agreed that whatever doesn’t sell at a yard sale will go to Goodwill.

So the purging and organizing has seen some pauses and progress. This is not all that bad, sometimes it is good to have pauses in the grand scheme of things; it helps with progress on the details. It also helps to have pauses on the details, it helps us pull back and look at the bigger picture, our ultimate goal. Through this process there is going to be many pauses and much progress, we will arrive at our ultimate goal when we get there, which will be the best time for us.

The Purge has begun.........

As I stated we are clearing out lives of all the unwanted, unneeded clutter. Well it has begun, it started one day when I could cram anymore into the junk drawer. This prompted me to clean it out and honestly I got rid of 90% of the stuff in there. Yesterday I tackled my bookshelf. This bookshelf sits next to our computer desk and holds my many cross stitching books, my school books and other random things that find their way from the desk to the shelf. Once again a majority of the stuff on there was a)either in the wrong place (the "set it there just for now" disorder) or b) garbage. Once I got rid of the garbage and put the things that were out of place where they belonged I was able to re-organize the shelves. Now all of my cross stitch books are on the bottom, the middle shelf is for papers that have to be filed, the 1st shelf is for my old school books and the way top right now is holding the dance tops I am working on but when school starts up it will also hold my current school books.  Now that the little areas are done it's time to move to the bigger areas. Our many closets (one of which is getting turned into a pantry), the garage and the garage attic area. I hope that we can eliminate at least 90% from all of those areas also. This should help us use our storage area more efficiently.

Modernly Simple?

What is modernly simple? To me modernly simple means getting back to a simpler way of life but doing it with a modern twist. I am not talking about "going green", though some of the things I am doing will have a green spin to them. The first thing that I am going to do is clear our lives of all of the unwanted and un-needed junk and clutter. This should help lower the stress in our life. I will update on the progress.