so retro

Justin and I have been super busy working on the house here lately. We've painted the exterior (mostly), worked on our garden, installed a dishwasher, a washer, and a drier, cleaned and rearranged things, and done a few small projects. I've got to show you one that we are both loving.

Remember all my wonderful finds from the New Athens town wide yardsale? Well, I got that amazing little record player, and I was trying to decide between fixing the record player and gutting it... we went with gutting it. Here's what we did :)

 This is the infamous before shot :)

 This is my wonderful husband getting those pesky screws out.

And this is the interior... Our Ipod and a little radio. We love it! It has a cool distortion from being in a box. We had a graduation party for Justin a few weeks ago, and everyone was like, "where's the music coming from... omg, is it coming from the record player? that's awesome." We are pretty proud of ourselves.



Now, the project that is driving my nuts at the moment is getting this last little bit of our kitchen done. When we moved in we had no appliances and a weird little desk thing in this spot. We tore out the little desk thing pretty early on because it served no purpose besides annoying me by taking up needed space.

I bought our dishwasher for $35 a few weeks ago. (Score!) My MIL's boyfriend Jim and Justin hooked it up, and it works great. TODAY, I bought this base cabinet from the St. Louis Habitat for Humanity Restore. I expected to pay around $20 for a base cabinet. I could not believe my eyes when I saw that the tag said $1! ONE DOLLAR PEOPLE! That made my day for sure.

 Now, it's door and handle do not match our cabinets, but I am working on that. I'm also working on getting a piece of counter top as close as possible to our existing counter top. Usually Home Depot comes through for me, but it looks like I'm going to have to go to a custom cabinets and counter tops place. This doesn't hurt my feelings too much since I got the cabinet for a dollar. SERIOUSLY A DOLLAR!

Since the cabinets were only a dollar, I also picked up this long skinny one. I've got some big ideas for it, but we will have to see. I'm thinking about hanging it horizontally  in my awkward little nook thing. Also, I think I want to put one of those lift up hydrolic frosted glass doors on it. I might use it to store my tea in. (I am already taking up a whole cabinet of just tea.)


I also went to the Goodwill outlet store. It's a giant Goodwill with bins that you have to sift through and everything in the bins is .79 a pound, books are .39 a pound, and none of the furniture or appliances is over $15. It was amazing! I got a bunch of cool stuff that I really want to show you, but I will have to save it for later. My poor pooch is very sleepy... and I am pretty tired too... sorting through all those bins tuckered me out, lol.

Good-night :)

TA-DA!!!

Well, lovelies! I have some pictures of my cabinets for you viewing pleasure.... so without further ado...

After

Before

After

Before

Also, my new fridge :)

My next project in the kitchen is to paint the tiles... they are a pretty color yellow, but it doesn't work with the rest of my color scheme for upstairs. Also they are plastic tiles, so they really don't look that great anyway.
here's a before

I am debating the color I want to paint them now... I was going to paint them a grayish white, that is lighter than the cabinets, and the accents were going to be a teal blue... I just feel like it might be too much white if I do... I might paint them a slightly darker gray color... leaning more toward gray and less toward white, for a bit more contrast. I might also paint the tiles a light blue and accent with a darker blue... I was afraid that next to the green it might be too much color... but I like color :) I don't know, I will have to stare at paint chips for hours again, lol.

I know the wall which the fridge is on now is going to become an accent wall... whatever colors I paint the accent stripes in the tile, I am going to paint that wall the same color. The dh is gonna build me some shelves and such for in there. It's gonna be really cool. I have the blue prints in my head :)

send me some love via comments... I <3 comments!

The Kitchen

The Kitchen:
I've been working hard on the kitchen cabinets for almost a month. They started out as icky laminate stock cabinets...

But then we took all the doors and hardware down, and sanded the heck out of everything. Two coats of primer later and the kitchen already seemed brighter and happier :)


Today I put the first coat of paint on the fronts of all the doors. Everything else has two coats. MIL came over and primed the insides of my cabinets, which I'm really grateful for... it looks MUCH better that way! I might paint the insides blue or yellow... I think a pop of color inside would be nice.


This is my basement workspace. Yeah, it's dreary... but it was too cold and wet when I started to paint outside.

There will be pictures soon of the new color. It's called "Alpaca" and it's a tanish creme color.

In the works

• paint the insides of the cabinets
• put the cabinets back together
• find some contact paper I can live with (I HATE contact paper but the former owner had it, and the shelves are all nasty and sticky, and I can't get them clean... I feel I have no choice... unless someone has an idea!? I'm open to ideas!)
  
• sand, prime, and paint the yellow and black tiles
• paint the accent wall
• lay down the tiles for the floor
• find inexpensive pulls and cups (or spray paint the old ones)
• make a cafe curtain
• make recycling bin
• and a thousand other things, lol