Summer house updates

 

It's been quite some time since I updated this blog, not that I am not still doing a lot around this house, we have just had a really busy summer.  On the Sunday before I am due to go back to my teaching job I thought I would share a few house updates for anyone that might still be out there reading.  We have had a fantastic summer with trips to San Francisco, and then New Zealand for 5 weeks so I have lots of those pictures to share too.  I thought I'd share some house pictures in this first post though.

 

I bought these new dining chairs for $20 each.  The person I bought them from said they were made in Dresden, Germany after WWII.  They are in great condition, just needed a little update with the fabric.  The picture below is the original fabric.

 

Then with new fabric:

(I didn't have to buy any, I just re-used from some World Market chair covers I had)

I love my new chairs.  At the beginning of the summer I had started re-painting the kitchen cabinets, starting with the island I painted a darker gray, and all the outer cabinets I painted "Simply White".  I am really happy with the change and the kitchen is a lot brighter and great to show off my vintage Fiesta and other dishes.  I took off the cabinet doors above the fridge to have more display space too.

 

The new chairs go perfectly with my maple Ethan Allen table I bought a few months previous.  Here it is with one of the extra leaves added

 

On this side is all our "everyday dishes" of fiestaware.  I cleared out the drawer below on the left for all my teas.

 

Even the pantry got a little update with new handles to match the other cabinet hardware.

 

And another summer find is this little arm chair, I found at a resale shop for $20.  The fabric is in perfect condition and the frame was already painted that pretty light blue.

 

And even our old door from the garage that leads through the laundry room into the kitchen got a makeover with a coat of dark gray. 

More summertime home improvements

We got something taken care of that has been needed since we moved in over 3 years ago. We knew there was a leak under the sink, there was some moisture under there, but we also knew a professional was needed to come in and take care of it properly as it was behind the cabinet wall under the sink.
Of course we could see it was even worse once the wall was opened up. What had happened, maybe even when the house was first built (1995) a contractor had shot a nail into one of the copper pipes going through the 2 by 4 piece of wood, so water had been slowly dripping out into the wall for years. So first of all we had plumbers come in and re-do all the piping, then another contractor come in and replace all the rotted wood, and replace the sheetrock, do the wall texture and put in a new baseboard.

MESS!

Bigger hole in the wall but work in progress getting cleaned up

looking better already - with new baseboard and wall texture

but much better with a fresh coat of white paint.

a couple of months ago I sold my old iron bar stools and replaced them with these wooden ones from Walmart

I found these cool blue pitchers at Ross for about $6 each. I love them because they are like old vintage style fiestaware and bauer pottery.

love my fiestaware and other colorful dishes. I'm putting the start of a little collection of green planters on the top of the cabinets for a change

Also a couple of weeks ago I got a new pendant light fixture for above the sink. This was one of the easy kits you can just take out the light bulb and screw into the recessed light fixture.

Light and bright change in the kitchen

The kitchen has had a lot of changes since we moved into this house a little more than 2 years ago.  One of the first things I did was paint the cabinets, and add hardware.  We had 2 nice cabinets with glass front doors to display some pretty dishes.

Since I painted them, I have wanted to paint the insides of the cabinets too, especially since I started collecting some fiestaware and other vintage dishes.  As a temporary fix I had the backs lined with scrapbook paper.

Last week when I finally had the motivation to paint the cabinets, I also took off the 2 middle cabinet doors so I would have even more open storage to display pretty things.

Here is an "in progress" shot

Here the cabinets are NOW:

And a look back to see where we started, a very nice big open kitchen, but very brown!



and now:

Linking here:

The Christmas tree

Here is our tree all decorated in the house.  It is a Virginia pine.  Hopefully it will still be green in 3 weeks for Christmas day.  It has been soaking up a lot of water every day.  We have no theme for decorating.  The last couple of years I did 2 trees - one for me to decorate and one for the kids.  This year we have a mix match  

of everything on one family tree. 

 I had to add some extra pictures of our family room and kitchen because I took the day off work today and the kids were at school and the opportunity to have the counter totally clean and free of clutter needed to be documented!

One last Christmas project was these wreaths I made and hung on our front windows.  I used plain grapevine wreaths, wrapped with garland from Dollar tree, and I added silver poinsettia ornaments (from Dollar tree too.)

I have wanted to do wreaths like this since I saw these at the Guenther House in San Antonio last year