patterning kitchen cabinets

So last I left off with the kitchen work, it looked something like this.

Now, I could have cleaned up the paint on the glass cabinet fronts, however, there were about five layers of multicolored paints that had gotten onto the textured interior surface of the glass that I couldn't remove despite my best efforts. So I brainstormed other ways to deal with the glass fronts that were inexpensive and most importantly removal  (because: rental) and came up with contact paper!. Once again, such a useful material.

I started with white contact paper and just cut pieces to fill in the glass portion of the doors. And while this looked clean and fine and was a massive improvement, it didn't seem very..... exciting. So naturally I began to think about patterns as well. 

There wasn't much of a plan honestly, I just started working up a sort of abstract stripe pattern.

And it turned into this. I am still on the fence actually. I like it, and it's fun and interesting and different. Also seeing as it's easy to remove and or change, I figure if I get sick of it I can just swap it out for a new  pattern. Perhaps polka dots? Or should I just leave it plain white? All thoughts and opinions are welcome!

August muni people

{snapshot}

August circus party

This months party went together very quickly, if a bit down to the wire time wise. I went with a circus theme because I have this set of beautiful circus printed tin plates I wanted to use and the rest of it just fell into place naturally. 

I set the table with a red eyelet tablecloth and the aforementioned tin plates. Polka dot glasses with striped straws for beverages, and simple white napkins with gold flatware finished it off. With the cake on a pedestal in the middle I just added a collection of rubber animals down the middle of the table to finish things off. Simple but with a fair amount of color and interest. 

On the wall I used red washi tape to put up a blown up photo of my mother feeding elephants in the circus, and I used a roll of bright blue tickets as streamers hanging across the table. Again, very simple but still makes an impact. I made up a simple ticket image for place cards and printed it on blue paper to tie the streamers color into the table setting.

For the cake I painted stripes on some white card stock and made the circus tent, then added some tiny animals around the perimeter.

Budget

Tickets.........................................................................4.00
Blueprint copy.............................................................4.00
washi tape....................................................................3.00
total............................................................................11.00

Kitchen progress

The kitchen is the room in my apartment that I would most like to change. However, as a renter, I am fairly limited to what I can do. Of course, I feel very blessed to have full reign to paint and change so much of my apartment, but in reality, this is a kitchen that has been treated very poorly for years, and therefore, the best solution would probably be to rip it out and start from scratch. With that off the table though, I did have to try out whatever else was available to me.

As you can see from these pictures, the kitchen has been painted many many times in it's long history, and not painted well, or correctly. The doors of the cabinets should have been removed and sanded before they were repainted each time, but instead the culprit just painted over everything, and now it's all so thick it's impossible to remove any of the hardware without some sort of power tools. And as there's a super high chance some or all of these layers of paint have lead in them, sanding wasn't really even an option, too toxic. So I decided that if the doors wouldn't close all the way, and the finish was going to be uneven, and the hardware wasn't exactly lined up, I could at least put a fresh coat of paint over it all so that it would be clean and true white as opposed to the above pictured layered mess, and I would be (hopefully) safe from flakes of paint drifting down into my granola in the morning. I got a can of Benjamin Moore in Chantilly Lace (the same white I used for all the trim in the house, including the kitchen) and covered everything in two coats. Luckily the coverage is excellent and I was technically painting over another white of sorts, or at least all the colors were light, so I was able to achieve a good even bright white.

It might look a bit chaotic here but it's already a significant improvement. Of course the weird tile counter tops are now more beige than the cabinets but I can't win them all. Next, I am working on a solution for the cabinet fronts, to hide the jumbled mess in the cabinets, as well as the accent wall and of course, most important and impactful of them all...... the floors!

{snapshot}

the quickest fixes are sometimes the best

I am in the midst of a slightly impromptu kitchen renovation (at least as much as a very old and quirky rental apartment can be renovated) and despite having done a bunch of work, do not quite have a photos of finished projects yet. Everything should be coming together with the last big project this weekend so hopefully soon. But in the meantime I thought I'd share this one small redo that sort of started this whole process.
Really the kitchen redo began because I was cleaning and just not feeling like things were actually getting cleaned. My kitchen doesn't have any sort of range hood or fan and there's one window at the far side of the room so even if that's open, it's not the best ventilation. Therefore the regular cooking smoke and such has slowly been coloring every surface over the years. I scrubbed down every surface, all the appliances, and have been applying a fresh coat of paint to all the walls and cabinets, but while I was cleaning the white fridge, I hit a wall with the refrigerator door handles. While the doors and sides cleaned up very well, the handles were just....not. And they stood out in even greater contrast to the cleaned surfaces of the rest of the fridge. So while I was staring them down I noticed.... screws! These were removable!

So I took them both off, set them up on my roof and applied a good half dozen thin coats of white spray paint. I let them dry overnight and then put them back on the doors. This small change has made such a big impact on how I feel about my kitchen. The fridge looks clean and fresh and every time I go to open the door to get something out I smile with relief at how nice and clean the handles are. For a free fix (I always have white spray paint) I just can't believe I didn't think of this sooner.