$80 Kitchen Remodel Reveal!

When I tell people I redid my kitchen, including now countertops, for around $80, they always look at me like I'm nuts. But it happened, and I've got to say I'm so proud of my thriftiness and creativity!

To get caught up to speed, you should probably read my post on my original PLAN for this room. I followed that up with a step by step of what I had decided to do in Let's Talk Kitchen Renovation! A lot of prices and products I used are listed in those posts.


This project was a LONG time overdue in happening, but now that's it's over I am kicking myself that I didn't do it like this when we originally did the room 5 years ago.  Remember how it looked before?? (The various was it looked before? haha!) To see how it looked in the VERY BEGINNING of our lives here, you can check out the KITCHEN EVOLUTION post.

Yeah, all that's gone now! I can't believe I lived like that for almost 5 whole years!

BUT HERE IT IS NOW!!

Let me show you around! - I would like to note that I got this project finished while I still had all my summer decor out, but now it's all fall-ish at my house, so things decor-wise may look a bit different now.

Yeah! It's so much brighter!! I love it!

I love how the table looks (it's showing up very red in this photo. It's not that red) with the new wall color, so much prettier!

I kept a lot of what I already had over my cabinets, including my big "BLESSED" that I got on sale at Hobby Lobby a few years ago.

It says "Missy's Kitchen, est. 2009" The bottle is a "Cheerwine" bottle. It's a lot like Cherry Coke but more cherry than coke. My Mom used to love it when she was in her early 20's and first married. I think she actually lived in the town where they made it, but I'm not sure. We found this at Cracker Barrel and bought a few bottles! And then the Mason Jar is filled with rocks that I picked up from out of the ocean in the Bahamas when we went in 2013.

My giant "R" was also from Hobby Lobby. I painted the bottle and the star blue with leftover front door paint! And, ya gotta have the glass "RC Cola" bottle. It's Aaron's favorite drink, ever! 

I thought it would be cute to have some photos of Aaron and I in the kitchen when we were little on display. This one is of him, ear to ear in chocolate pudding. How adorable?!

And this one is me, in my Dorothy costume, making biscuits with my Mama. I was probably 3 or 4. 

I change out this picture seasonally, but it's always a shot of me and my Dad. This one is a fun memory. He'd been fishing and pulled up in the driveway yelling for my Mom to bring me outside. He said "I caught a fish that's as big as my baby! Bring her out here and let's measure them up!" And, as you can see, the fish is as big as his baby. :)  Currently there's a shot of him and me, as Little Red Riding Hood, on Halloween in the frame by the window!

The pantry stands out so much more than it did before! It's easier for me to see what I have now!

Here's my iPad/TV set up in the kitchen! It's such a small space I wouldn't have room for a TV, unless it was teeny, so I just hook the iPad up to this iPod dock, put the iPad on an easel, and there ya have it, instant television! :) I use the heck out of this system! (I do need a less obnoxious easel though!)

 My microwave area! It's amazing to me how much easier this room is to keep clean now!! This section of the room was the first to get "finished" and for a moment I thought it was all too light, but after living with it for a few days, I had no regrets!

The stove (it's even prettier now!), and my little helper! She hung in there like a trooper with me while I was doing all of this! I did purchase the hand towel, and pot holder and oven mitt set specifically for the new kitchen and it was a $5 set from Dollar General!

I decided I was too tired to cook the day after it was all finished (I finished it around 2 or 3am, actually) so I stuck a meal in the crock pot! 

I leave this butcher block cutting board out all the time. It's arranged a bit differently now, for fall, but it's still out all the time. A very good idea, and super easy to clean up!

DIY EVERYTHING! Haha! DIY lotion, and DIY lamp! I painted both the lamp base and the shade! If I eventually find something I like better, ok, and if I don't I like this just fine! 

 MORE DIY! I did the "EAT" out of cardboard. I free-handed the letters, cut them out with an exact-o knife (it's not perfect but I didn't expect it to be), painted them blue with leftover front door paint and attached them to the wall with 3M tape! I LOVE it!  The curtains over the windows I found on sale at Dollar General for $5 a panel. I bought 3! (The one over the sink I cut in half and split up the middle!)

 My flowers and DIY table runner! My cooking utensils are actually living in the owl pitcher now, and I'm using my glass cake stand full of homemade cookies as a centerpiece! I loved that I could still use this runner! My Mom made it for me and monogrammed our last name initial onto each end. There's enough teal blue in it that it works!

 Chandelier is even more beautiful now!

The room is a small room. and we have a large table, but it all feels so much BIGGER now that it's so light!
 

I find myself WANTING to be in the kitchen now. I just LOVE how it all turned out.

Be sure to visit the posts linked above for prices on items (including my "new" countertops) and names of paint colors and such! I'm tickled pink and blue (wink wink) with this room and can't tell you how satisfying it was to completely change it for such a small price!

Thanks for catching up with me today! See y'all soon!

The Plan

Good Afternoon my few and faithful! 

Today I want to share with you my planning/thought process when I'm planning out a home "redesign" project.

The room I'm working hard on at present is the Kitchen. I recently finished - pretty much - my home office and am just waiting for a final touch or two to finally share it with you. I need a handful more of little items to be able to call it a wrap on that room. But now I'm turning my near full attention to the kitchen.

If you read my Kitchen Evolution post you will know it's been through it's ups and downs. When we first "took possession" of the house and started renovating we painted the cabinets a dark chocolate brown with a very expensive oil based paint. The cabinets are old, from the 1960's, and are a flat panel door. I don't particularly care for flat panel doors, period, but this house is full of them, so I'm living with them. We also chose to paint the walls a sage green color. A very pretty color, but as my home evolves, it's becoming the odd man out. We even went ahead and had the counter tops replaced.

I ended up going with our dark counter tops because granite was unavailable at the time, because of money, and there was nothing else in the store that I liked, even remotely. Plus is went with dark cabinets and green walls. It was the most evasive thing we did when working on this house, and I'm still glad we went ahead and did it. 

As these 5 years have worn on, my house has undergone some big changes and for the most part, the kitchen has always felt ok to me. The decor started leaning more toward the country style, with floral curtains and floral china pieces being displayed over the cabinets, and then we introduced the big new table into the room and that pushed it even further country. But as the house turned blue around it (comment below if you would like to see a tour of everything aqua in my home) the green kitchen started feeling like the loner kid on the playground. 

So, what do I do? I start by thinking about it. For the longest time, I felt the fault was with the cabinets, so I started thinking of ways to lighten up the cabinets, and had even settled on buying white contact paper and covering them, in their entirety. But one afternoon I was cruising Pinterest, like I do, and saw a photo of dark cabinets against a light beige wall. And the light bulb in my head not only came on, but it started flashing.

You're doing it wrong! Don't paint the cabinets! DON'T contact paper the cabinets! Paint the walls!

It was pretty clear the direction I needed to go after that realization, so I had to start to hatch my plan, by listing what is important to me in the project.

• It cannot cost a whole lot of money - and I must unload some of my "sellables" in order to fund such a project. Perhaps the "Bank of Husband" would work finance a loan haha!
• I'd like the walls to be a light beige color, to flow with the rest of the house and to work well with my aqua accent color. I would definitely be going with a paint color from Lowe's Allen+Roth line because it is only $30 per gallon.
• (as with the office) Paint, or DIY as many accessories as possible to save money.
• Contact paper the nearly black counter tops.

After making out the list (it's usually a mental list) of the things I want to accomplish in the room, I go to Pinterest and create an inspiration board to help me visualize how it will turn out. Check out my "Kitchen Spruce Up" board HERE. I determine, from there, the style I'm going for and what will work in my space and what won't. It always helps that I have a creative mind.

Then I add the things that "speak to me" from Pinterest onto my list. 

• New curtains (or re-purpose some I already have) for both windows. (One set will go to the floor)
• new artwork - DIY I love this giant "EAT" from sweetpickinsfurniture.com.
  
  This could be accomplished by either buying the letters from Michaels (around $2 a letter I think) or I could have my father in law, wood craftsman that he is, cut them out for me, but then I decided that cardboard would be the easiest route to go. A little cardboard, some paper mache and a little aqua paint and we are in business. Completely free because of my left over aqua paint from my Front Door Makeover!
  I also like the idea of simple kitchen art, like this Mason Jar print from printabledecor.net
  
  

  

I find I am much more satisfied, and proud, of my end results when I do things myself. 

hookedonhouses.net

 I know that I want whatever the end result to be to work well with Aqua accessories. So I find photos like the one above to help me visualize how much aqua is too much or not enough. BTW, if my kitchen was this size, I'd never leave it. Are you kidding me? I love it!  Plus, if you go into Kohl's now they are offering so many fun, bright colored kitchen products. They will probably be going on sale soon to make way for Christmas things! I can't wait for that! (I want the aqua blue little cow shaped figurine so bad!)

After I've got my Pinterest board set up, I head over to Amazon, to check out their selection to see if I want to buy, or to DIY and re-purpose. In this case, I already know I want a counter-top looking contact paper to cover my counters. Originally I thought I would go with something just for the back splash, but after I started looking, I found this.

And yes, I screen-shot this for ya'll to see. (My pink polka dot theme came from Firefox's add-ons page, in case you were wondering.) Here's a link to the Amazon Listing. As soon as I saw it, my brain shot to an image of my brown cabinets, beige-y walls and aqua goodness sitting on top. I knew it was the one. I ultimately decided it'd be safest to go with the 75ft roll for $30 to be on the safe side.

The only other thing I knew I might want to spend a little cash on was some curtains, and I've been lucky on finding inexpensive sheer curtains (my favorite style) on Amazon for about $8 for 2 panels. But what color did I want? I was afraid if I went with an aqua color I'd end up getting this insane bright neon blue color, and I didn't want that, at all. Best to stick with a neutral if you ask me. I could do with a set of "ivory" sheers for $8 per 2 panels, as I'd expected. But after thinking about it for a while, I decided against buying new curtains. I got creative again. The sheer curtains on our big living room window were just hanging there, and we already had a set of drapes hanging there, so the sheers were just adding bulk to the window coverings. And that window is huge, I mean huge. So I thought about it, and decided to re-purpose those sheers. It will save that $8, and I can put it toward the paint and/or contact paper. The windows in this house (except for the big window in the living room) aren't exactly "pretty" but my "cover it up" attitude from 5 years ago really sucks now because of the lack of any natural lighting. I'll clean the fire out of the windows and the ledges and deal with the cracks if it means I can have a light and bright room to hang out in,


A lot of this project will be the de-clutter of my over the counter shelf, using the bare bones of decor - my large dark brown "R" will stay, for sure, my "Blessed" from Hobby Lobby will stay and a few other little knick knacks will stay. I will add in a few items - I have a gold basket weave star shaped box my Dad got me years and years ago (I love stars) that I am planning on slapping a little aqua paint on. I also have a star shaped box that has the world "believe" written on it that I will probably add as well as some other things I have laying around the house. My floral china pieces I think I will tuck away in a box for now, because until I have a proper china cabinet, I just don't feel like they will 'go' with the new look. I also really like the idea of a few photos up there. I've got some cute ones of me when I was a baby "cooking" with my Mama, and then a couple of cute ones of Aaron when he was a lil' tyke... especially the one of him with his face covered, ear to ear, with chocolate pudding. Adorbs. So that's an idea too.




OK. After I decide for sure what I want to do, I go to Lowe's and look at my paint options - we are going tonight. If I am dead set, I'll go ahead and purchase it, but if not, I'll take a sample home and check it out with the surroundings to see if i like it, I would specifically check to see if it "went" with our counters. But since I am changing the counters too, I will probably just go for it and buy tonight.

The middle of September will start to be super busy for me (I'm doing another play!) and so I won't have that much time to devote to home redesign. So I want to get this project done soon, very very soon. Like, next week soon. I'd like to start it tomorrow but I don't have my contact paper (unless I miraculously find it at Lowe's tonight!), and I'm the type of person that likes 1 day transformations.  Pretty much all my redesigns are done in a single day.

So now that I've got my plan pretty much in place, I clean the room, thoroughly, and get it ready for it's makeover!


In short (too late), here's The Plan!

• paint the walls
• contact paper the counter tops
• paint accessories
• diy some art
• diy "new" curtains 
• redesign over the cabinet decor 

I'll update you all when the project is finished. I will also post photos of the office as soon as those final touches are in place!


Here I go, again!

Thanks for stopping by again today! I love you all! 

 

OFFICE RE-DO!

I'm so excited! If you are personal friends with me on Facebook (and I know some of you are!) you probably saw where all day yesterday I was doing a major re-organize/re-decorate in my little orange chevron office.

It's about 1:30 on Tuesday morning (it's my brother's baby girl's due date... Aunt Missy is patiently- impatiently- waiting!) and I've been at it for about 15 1/2 hours... it was a major clean out in my office closet, I've been putting that off for years, and I moved a piece of furniture and am making a space for a new one, and I'm creating a full on crafting space... as well as ridding myself of the bright orange chevron. I hate the color orange. I love the fruit orange, but hate the color orange. Yuck. I have just never seen anything in orange that I really liked. Of course part of that could be the fact that I am a die-hard University of Kentucky fan. But anyway....

What does Missy do when Missy wants to redecorate but can't afford it? She pulls out the spray paint!

I've been spray painting since about 8pm... I ran out of one color around 9:30 so I had to pull out some left over regular paint that just happened to be the perfect shade for what I was doing.

I've got to go pick up my new crafting table (thanks Mama!) tomorrow and while I'm out I need to stop and pick up some contact paper to cover my table tops, all of them. I have three tops to cover: my desk, I love the desk but I'm apparently a very oily person, so I'm rubbing the finish off the top where my arms rest when I type. The table next to my desk, where I used to have my printer, which doesn't work. So I moved it and set up a bill/to file station. And then, of course, my crafting table. I want the pretty black and white floral contact paper, cause it will go with my color scheme, and it will brighten up my dark furniture. I'm also purchasing a large cork bulletin board to go over my crafting table, it will be a pretty edition to the room and my plan is to use it as my "IDEA" board, I even hand lettered a cutsey little "Idea" sign earlier in my evening. (I did go ahead and washi tape the dimensions off on my wall so that I could get the "feel" of having the board up until I can order it.)

So, does anyone have any guesses as to what my color scheme is?? It probably won't take a genius to figure it out. Aqua and Pink. Along with some black and white of course. And I'm talking, eventually, all shades of pink. It's my favorite color for me and aqua is my favorite color for decor at the present.


I got inspired on Sunday afternoon when the sight of my orange lampshades nearly made me vomit. So after about a second and a half of searching on Pinterest for ideas, I quickly, very quickly, hatched a design. I'm excited to get this project finished, entirely, and show it to you. A LOT of this project has been DIY and I'm only giving myself a $40 budget to completely redo the room, and most of that budget is going to the large cork board. The room still has to house my treadmill, so I have that to take into consideration, but I think my plan for my crafting table and desk, which I am not moving, should actually give me a lot of room to use the treadmill.

It's pretty late and I have a ton of things to get put away, the tool box, a few containers, the paint (Lord, the paint) and I'm dying of thirst and, to be honest, quite smelly. You love me for my honesty, you know you do. I'm sure my poor, poor, sweet, dear husband wishes I would shut off the music, and the lights, bathe, and get in bed. But, you all know me, I'm a clean freak, and until I can walk into this room tomorrow with my craft table in one hand and my contact paper in the other, and not have to stumble over anything (except my things for Goodwill and my things to sell online) I will not rest.

I'm a happy little lady tonight, but I'm beginning to run down, so I'd best get to hopping before I fall asleep sitting here at the desk!

I hope you all are as excited to see this super DIY office as much as I am excited to show it to you!

Our Non-Pantry

My pantry is different from other people's. I envy those of you with a nice built in, matching your cabinets, floor to ceiling style pantries. Or those of you with whole rooms built to the sides of your kitchens that house all your food. Or even with giant closets in your kitchens that act as pantries. I go to other peoples homes and I just stand and stare into their pantries, taking a mental photograph. It's sad. I sometimes refer to it as our "non-pantry."

When Aaron and I first moved into this house it became very evident to me, very quickly, that we needed a pantry. We have a fair amount of cabinet space in our kitchen, but I was having to load all of our non-refrigerator food into one cabinet, and the weight of all the cans etc was starting to weigh the cabinet down and make it sag. I could just see the cabinet falling out of the wall in the middle of the night one night. It was terrifying. I needed a solution and quickly.

So I started searching Pinterest for ideas. Pinterest was a fairly new thing at the time - it's strange calling Pinterest a "new thing" - and it didn't have a whole lot to offer me -- (Of course now it has pages and pages of "no pantry" solutions. Of course.) until I saw this picture from marthastewart.com. I don't know what it was about this precise image, but the idea light bulb lit up over my head.

There was something in that image that made it all come together in my head. So, knowing my budget, I left work that night and headed to the Family Dollar store that was just down the road.



And this is what I came up with. We had this empty space here to the side of our fridge. It had housed our trash can (which I removed for the sake of the photographs. It's usually pushed up against the side of the fridge) and a broom. And when the idea finally came to me, I knew it was the perfect spot for something like this. It's nothing super fancy. It's not very visually appealing, but it's super functional and it works for us! That's the important thing. Now I'm not going to lie and tell you that this is the permanent solution to our problems, I'm looking into maybe upgrading my shelving unit soon. This has worked for us since 2011 with little to no trouble.


What I did was I went into the Family Dollar and purchased the units. I've got a million of these things all over my house tucked into various places. They're inexpensive, easy to assemble and fairly strong for how cheap they are. I ended up deciding to buy one 4 shelf unit ($30) and one 3 shelf unit ($20), and I combined them, omitting one shelf, but using all the hardware included.

All you do it take it out of the box, lay the shelf, insert the spindle and screw (no tools required). Do you call that a spindle?? I don't know what you call it, the stick thang. Screw the stick thangs together then add another shelf. Easy. I had it assembled in probably 10 minutes. I chose not to take the unit any higher than the fridge, 1) because it would look tacky and 2) because it might be too top heavy. Like I said this isn't the most sturdy piece of furniture you could ever purchase.

After about 30 minutes of moving my food stash around I was done and so proud of myself.

This is where we keep our stockpile of food. Our "extra" food, if you want to call it that. We keep our cereals and snacks and chips and things that are open or that we use all the time (like ramen noodles, peanut butter, bread, cereal, chips, pop tarts, cookies etc) in the cabinet, but everything else lives here.  I keep all my flour, sugar, corn meal etc in a cabinet by my stove, as I reach for those all the time.

I also keep a "bag bag" hanging on the wall here and my favorite apron hangs on the door that leads into my disastrous utility room. It's an insane mess right now, let's not even go there.

I keep our weekly meal plan posted on this side of the fridge as well. This is so easy for me because I can stand at the pantry and plan my meals out. ("yoyo means 'you're on your own' for those wondering) I just found this page online - did a Google search - and printed it off. I slid it into a sheet protector and use a dry erase marker on it to write my list. I also keep my grocery list pad of paper hanging here, with a pencil. I got the pad at the dollar store, you can find these things anywhere. As soon as I run out of something, I write it down. Makes it so much easier on grocery day!


So now, let me take you on a quick tour of how I have everything set up. 

On the top shelf I keep my large package of paper towels. I buy whatever is on sale, and this time, it happened to be Bounty Basics! And in the little clear plastic box I keep baking things. Cause I don't bake cakes or cookies much, so the powdered sugar and hot chocolate and cupcake liners etc live there.

On the next shelf down this is where I keep all of our condiments and honestly whatever else will fit. Because this is such a small space to work with I kind of just have to go with whatever fits wherever.  We keep lots of salad dressings on hand as well as BBQ sauce, bacon bits, gordita shells, taco sauce and tea bags!

On the next shelf I keep all our boxes of things, like hamburger helper, stuffing and boxes of like Zatarans Rice (it's hiding in the back). I can arrange things two deep on these shelves, which I really like. We love the Save-A-Lot instant potatoes... I know, I know. It's so lazy but I could live on mashed potatoes so when I want them, I want them now and don't want to chop up potatoes and boil them and mash them and... no. I want my potatoes now. So to avoid this whole shelf being boxes of potato flakes, I keep them in this airtight container. We also have a large bag (SAM's Club) of coffee that we keep here. (We have a keurig, but buying the K-Cups was breaking the bank. We bought the refillable cups and fill them ourselves every morning. Easy, and saves all kinds of cash.)

Here I keep all our spaghetti noodles (Aaron would live on Spaghetti if I'd make it every night) and macaroni. We keep our pasta sauce here, some pasta on the side packets, and I've got all our spice packets and yeast packets organized here, where they would fit. And one lone package of Ramen Noodles. I crunch mine up in the bag before I boil them, and after I crunched this bag up I decided I wanted something else, so I just laid it in the pantry to grab next time. 

 Canned veggies go here, I also have a few empty glass jars back in the back. I like frozen veggies and canned veggies both and I keep them both in the house at all times. Save-A-Lot has a huge selection of canned vegetables!

And finally on this bottom shelf is where the heavy soup cans live. I also keep our Chef Boyardee type things here. (Please excuse the mouse trap in the corner. Old house, recently bush hogged field across the road... mice. Ick.) We aren't big soup eaters, only when we are sick or in the winter, so I don't keep a whole lot of that kind of soup, but I do use cooking soups all the time, so I run through those quickly.



Not a bad job for $50 and 40 minutes of my night, I don't think. Do you? This works for us. I am always on the hunt for a more sturdy shelving unit that is the right width, because we are working with such a cramped space. But I haven't found one for the right price as of yet. I don't have to be in a huge hurry, because, I'll say it again, this works for us. I saw the need, I made it happen!

Do you have a non-pantry pantry like us? Share it with me! I'd love to see it!

Thanks for stopping by again today! I hope you, at least, got a chuckle out of this post, I know it wasn't much, but I thought sharing this - a way to create something where there is nothing on the cheap - would be a nice post to share!

I'm working hard on the kitchen evolution post so hopefully I will be able to get it posted tomorrow, but I won't make any promises.

Front Door Makeover! (On a Budget!)

 FINALLY! I've been wanting to get this little project done for the past 5 years. Almost the minute we moved in, I wanted to paint our front door. I couldn't decide on a color, so I just never did bring this project off of the back burner.

Link to the blog containing this photo is available on my "The Honeymoon Cottage" board on Pinterest.

Until I found this photo on Pinterest. I fell in love with the look of this, because, mainly, it's almost the exact same color brick as our house. I loved the color of the blur against the color of the brick, and the galvanized buckets (still working on that one!) and the chalk board... I adored it. I showed it to Aaron, he loved it. My father in law loved it. My mom loved it. My best friend in Alabama loved it and bugged the crap out of me asking me if I'd gotten it done yet....


And then the wheels started turning at warp speed. This was another instance of, I can do this project but it has to be on a super tight budget. Aaron and I decided that I could do it only if I did it for less than $70.

I did my research, which included a planning trip to Lowe's one Saturday afternoon with my Mom. I knew I needed new hardware, so I found a great oil rubbed bronze set (knob and deadbolt) from GateHouse for $21.97, I also decided I wanted to add our house number to the door.  So I found the oil rubbed bronze GateHouse numbers for around $3.95 (I think) a piece (they were a few cents shy of $4). And finally I needed the paint. No need to buy a gallon to paint a front door, I purchased a quart of Valspar Duramax at Lowe's for $18, after about an hour of looking at every aqua blue they offered, I decided on the color "Crystal Aqua."

All together, that brought my estimated total, pre-tax to $55.89, I rounded it up to $60, told Aaron, and he gave me the ok. In the end, the total, plus tax, was $59.20. Score!

Because of Memorial Day and the fact that we had a big day planned with my in-laws, I ended up finally painting on Tuesday. I think I drove my sisters in law crazy talking about how excited I was to get to finally paint my front door!


It was an all day job. Because I can't do anything the easy way. NOTHING.

First I had to sand the door down. Just a titch. I used 180 grit sand paper(just whatever I had on hand) and gave both sides of the door a quick once over. Next I cleaned the door off with a vinegar and water mix. I let that dry while I mixed up my paint and my Floetrol. It's supposed to help eliminate brush strokes, however, in this instance, it didn't, and, in this instance, I like it. So I left it.

I turned on the TV - Space Jam was on VH1 and, because I'm 12 years old at heart, I watched it, and then some of.... wait for it.... The Borgias - and got to work.

I got to work taking the old, nasty hardware off.... and that was a task, let me just tell ya.

As you can see, the hardware was in BAD shape. The doorknob was plain embarrassing. Or at least it was to me.  Taking the plate out of the wall for the deadbolt took me, literally, all day off and on. The heads in the screws were stripped out, badly, so finally I had to get the drill out and drill the heads out. Always my last resort. And then once it came off, the new deadbolt wouldn't go into the hole... I had to widen the hole with my drill... it was a hassle. But, in the end, the door closes, and the deadbolt latches! So yay for that! I only broke one screwdriver head and one drill bit.... that's not too bad.... right? 


So I got to work painting once all the old ugly gold hardware was gone. I painted 3 coats on the front door after the first two were horribly brush strokey. Glad I did too, the three coats really makes the paint solid looking, like it was made that way. And I only did 2 coats on the interior or the door. And by the time Aaron came home, it looked like this! (However, I do believe it's time for a different wreath on the door.... hmmmm....let me put that on my shopping list! For now, this works.) I painted the window trim, some wouldn't have, but I did, because with the blue door and the stark white trim... it kinda looked like a baby blanket. No... not good.

The new hardware REALLY pops against the aqua! (The best news, to us, is that we now only have 1 front door key instead of 2!)

I think adding the number to the door just makes this project! I'd wanted to have our house number actually on our house for a while, and the way the exterior of our house is set up, putting it on the door makes more sense than anything. I absolutely LOVE this! 


I still have a few things to get for out front. I've been on the hunt for a milk jug for the longest time, but can't find one I like, that's a reasonable price. I need to get some new flowers for the bucket (I'm thinking hydrangeas and peonies, they're my all time favorites) and I'm toying with doing the chalkboard, like my inspiration picture showed. But idk, I'm attached to my star (they're like my favorite things ever) and my pineapple welcome sign. When my Mom and I were in Charleston, SC, the summer before I got married, they told us all about the history of the pineapple as a welcome thing and ever since she and I have made it a point to have a pineapple welcome at our front door. Plus, the one in the picture below was a gift from a very special lady to me and so I don't think I'll ever be able to part with it!

I also used to have a garden flag waving there at the door, but during our last set of storms it blew off into the abyss and I haven't managed to remember to purchase a new one.

I'm excited to see how the blue does with fall and winter decor! The possibilities are endless, folks!

Excuse the glare on the door, it's a bright, beautiful day here in KY!

My home isn't one of those Pinterest Perfect homes, but it's my home. It's where my heart is! And the blue front door just makes it seem so much more homey, in my opinion!