Sprucing things up a bit

Other than the baby projects I’d like to get done, I’ve started two projects recently that will add to our kitchen and living room. They aren’t quite done yet, but I’ll share what I’ve done to this point.

The Wall O’ Travel

Andrew said something to me recently about hanging more of our travel pictures, specifically from our trip to Bolivia last May. He brings up moving there about once a week now, and he just wrote one of his grad school papers on the groundwater situation where we worked. Who knows if that’s where God will call us, but we’re both more than okay if Bolivia is a stop!

In order to display some of those pictures, I first had to think about where they could go in our home. We don’t have a ton of wall space, which is sad to me since I love love love hanging pictures and have a TON. In fact, we were going to hang several of the paintings we’ve collected from overseas trips in our guest room, but that got nixed when we found out we were pregnant.

We have two really large windows in our living room, and there happens to be a nice space between one of those and our kitchen. I decided that would be the travel wall space, but I wanted to do something fun to it besides just hanging framed pictures and art.

Then I remembered a shutter I bought at an estate sale last summer. It cost a $1, but it may have been thrown in for free with the other things I bought. I was picking up some cool bottles for my friend Amanda’s wedding when I stumbled upon the old shutter. I figured I’d find something to do with it one day!

My plan is to glue letters spelling “travel” on the shutter and hang it horizontally at the top of the wall space. Then we’ll hang our framed pics in a collage underneath it. I originally wanted small wooden letters, but I ended up having to go with what Michael’s had--they're slightly larger than I wanted and cursive lowercase. So far I have the “t,” “r” and “v.” I’ll check back once a week until I have them all, then stain them in a driftwood stain we have in the basement.

Windowpanes in the kitchen

In addition to shutters, I also really love windowpanes. I have a huge one I got in college that we’ve never found a space for in the house. Maybe one day. For now, I have the one my friends turned into a chalkboard/bulletin board in our office. When they found that one, it had a friend that they left for me in our mudroom. I’m turning it into a chalkboard for our kitchen so I can use it for menu plans and/or grocery items.

So far I’ve cleaned it up and painted two of the three panes. One of the panes has a crack in it, and rather than have Andrew fix it for me (he did that for my big one in college) I think I’ll try to tape it up and glue cork to that pane to hang notes.

My soapy water to clean the shutter and window

Stay tuned for the finished products!

Weekend Update (minus Tina Fey)

Several steps of our kitchen process were not documented on the blog, so in this post you'll see two steps we took that were not previously documented. Here we go:

Insulation Install


After we tore down the '50s motif wall paneling, we discovered that the current insulation was pretty nasty. We should have expected it I suppose, since our house is old and hasn't been updated in decades. When we pulled it out we found most of it was flat and starting to deteriorate. I'm also pretty sure the pellets I found belonged to a rodent at some point in time. I can't find the pictures I took of the process but here are a couple of the new, fluffy insulation:

This is an interior wall that was previously an exterior wall. We removed the insulation from this wall, and Andrew started work on the electrical. 

Turning a window into a door


When Andrew and I first talked about redoing the kitchen, we couldn't decide what to do with the large window. You can see it in this picture back behind Sherpa.

To the left of this window was the door out to the deck. It and the basement door opened into one another--a small problem but not one that we initially felt we should address.

As we made plans and had the fabulous Rachel Whitehurst draw up plans for us, we talked about maybe putting in a smaller window. That way we could possibly put counters underneath it or put a bookcase or something else. Rachel drew up a plan with the same size window and one with a smaller one. We finally decided to just leave it the way it was.

That was until we were at the Bargain Outlet (where we purchased our beautiful cabinets for $3,000-5,000 less than our other estimates) and saw some sliding glass doors for pretty reasonable prices. We decided to buy one and get rid of the window. The decision also solved the problem of the basement door opening into the deck door--we'd just board up the deck door.

We finally had a sunny afternoon so Andrew and our neighbor Vinnie put in the new door. Andrew started by removing the siding on the outside of the house.

He took out the window and then cut a larger hole in the house.

Then Vinnie got here, and he and Andrew put in our door. They built some supports above the door, too, but I don't remember what they're called :)

Here's a view of the door from the outside:

While we were at it, we replaced the other kitchen window with a newer, more energy efficient window:

We finished up the day by caulking around the new door and window. It's not the first time I've done this, but I'm not fabulous at it as you can see by the gobs of caulk on the floor: