Painting the Kitchen

The end of June will be 10 years that I closed on my house. I cannot believe I have lived here for 10 years all ready. I lived in the house for over 6 years before I really started caring how it looked or did many updates to it. That is mostly in part due to lack of money but also I just didn't know what I wanted, how to do it and also I had someone else there who didn't do much around the house to help or motivate me to want to improve it.

2011 is when I finally had the freedom to start making the house the way I wanted it. The first thing that I did was paint my kitchen. This is long before my blogging days and before I really did much in regards to do it yourself so the pictures I have aren't great. They were taken with a poor quality Blackberry phone camera and not the best lighting or angles. I also didn't take good before photos so I'm going to try to look through old party photos to show what the kitchen looked like.

I knew I wanted a good red so I went to Home Depot and bought two samples. I painted squares on one part of the wall to try to figure out what red I wanted. It was my first time painting with a dark color. The best advice I can give is after the first coat, don't freak out with how uneven it looks. The second coat makes it look much better and evens it all out.

I have also learned to take your time and be very careful with taping off and going around the trim. Since this was one of my first projects I did NOT take my time and here it is 4 years later and I still look around and see spots I need to touch up. Red that bled through the tape, a spot on the ceiling or places where the tape wasn't totally straight. When you're doing such a dark color you're able to notice EVERYTHING.

Here are some before photos. This first one is from a party but it shows how there also once was wallpaper up as well.

Here is where I was trying out the two different reds. I opted for Behr Gardenia. I used their Paint and Primer in one paint. 

 

You can see I did tape off a lot but I still had a lot of touch ups to do. 

These are just the beginning photos of my kitchen redo. It has taken years and is still currently in progress. The red against the cabinets is not a look that I like.

 

So that is my updated kitchen painting photos. This was done in 2011 as I mentioned. The reason I decided to do this blog today was the "On this Day" thing on Facebook showed these photos and I figured even though it's an old project it's worth blogging about, especially since it was the first thing I really did.

I will try to do another one soon with the cabinets. That was the next thing I did in the kitchen. It really made the red look better. 

Curb Appeal - Front Porch

It is important to have nice curb appeal for your front house. It's most important if you're looking to sell your home because the first thing potential buyers see is the front of your home. I have no intentions on selling my home at this time but do hope to move in the future (5+years maybe). This means I have plenty of time to work on adding curb appeal to my home!

My last post I mentioned some of the updates I have done with the landscaping. Now that spring is here I try to do a little bit of yard work every weekend. This past weekend consisted on mostly just trimming branches and cleaning up a bit. I have two very large pine trees along my driveway that drop a lot of pine needles but also have low hanging branches. On Sunday I spent a lot of time trimming these back so they are not hanging on my car when I park in the driveway or so people are not walking into them when coming up the driveway.

On a bit of a whim, I bought a new welcome mat for the front door. The old one was ruined last summer when I was stripping paint off the front door before I repainted it. It was also about 9 years old so it was time for a new one. This one I saw at Target and fell in love because it just seems so colorful and happy.

The front of my house and the porch is lacking color and decor so the welcome mat helps. I also made a small flower planter this weekend. I've been wanting to add flowers to the porch or even right in front of the porch but planters can be so costly! I try to be frugal but my taste tends to run expensive. Some of the planters I've seen out that I like are $50+! I'm sorry but I'm not spending that sort of money on a planter.

Instead I went out and bought two cinder blocks for approximately $1.09 each! I bought a can of spray paint for $4.98 and sprayed them so they aren't just dreary grey blocks. Then I bought some flowers and potting mix and put them on the porch! I think it turned out fairly well. I need to do a quick touch up on the bottle of the blocks with the spray paint but I like the overall look.

I am thinking I may buy two more blocks and do the same thing and put it on the ground in front of the porch as well. Looking at this picture you can see a bit of the brick is crumbling in one area on the porch. I hope that having flowers in a planter will help hide that a bit. You can also see part of the welcome mat by the door in the photo.

I'm debating what to do with the chair. I could probably get it powder coated to cover the rust. When I had my big Newfoundland dog, Hobie I would sit on the porch in the chair and read and he would lay on the porch with me. Now that I don't have a dog, I feel odd sitting on my front porch. I'm considering removing the chair but I'm not sure if I should replace it with some sort of decor or just leave the front porch free of clutter.

Once I figure out exactly what I plan to do with the porch I will take more photos! Until then, that's my small update on curb appeal!