kitchen

DIY Kitchen Transformation: The New Floor Revealed

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Can you see the difference?
Can you see the difference? The vibrant wood grain should be the biggest difference you see, but we also nudged the color a little bit to make it more brown…less yellow/orange in color.

On Thursday and Friday, we had a contractor come in to sand and re-stain our hardwood floors. Jeff from “A Cut Above Hardwood Flooring” was recommended to us by our carpet cleaning guy.

This piece of floor is continuous from the front door to the kitchen, and to access the front door, garage, basement, and staircase, you will step on the hardwood. I’ll discuss how we dealt with that in a minute.

As mentioned before, there were some areas to the floor that had clearly suffered water damage, but had subsequently dried out. The wood was structurally sound, but the sealer and stain color were messed up. It was important to me that those areas get extra attention, and Jeff did that very well.

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DIY Kitchen Transformation: Painting the Rest of the Cabinets

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No turning back now! This is after the primer only. The real paint goes on tomorrow.
No turning back now! This is after the primer only. The real paint goes on tomorrow.

This weekend we are painting the cabinets. This is a much larger undertaking than the island we did last month. Instead of just the four doors we had to disassemble for the island, today we took down 28 doors!

Taking down and preparing the doors took a couple hours alone because we had to be sure to catalog them properly. Let’s talk about how it was done.

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DIY Kitchen Transformation: Crown Moulding Installation

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This past weekend Dave installed the crown moulding around the tops of our cabinets. This isn’t a super-tall design, we wanted something subtle, yet elegant.

Later this week and this weekend we will start the priming and painting of the rest of the cabinets. We have a paint sprayer to use for the doors, but will hand-paint the cabinet bases.

We also picked up our hardware for the cabinet doors and drawers. I can’t wait to see how awesome they look when installed.

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The moulding is white because we chose a PVC composite.

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DIY Kitchen Transformation: Testing Island Colors

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Bear with me while I try to figure out the iPhone version of my blog editor. Tonight we tried out a couple “browns” for the kitchen island. This is a primer-less paint, and we are just covering this panel with beadboard so you aren’t seeing our “A game” in terms of paint prowess. We overwhelmingly … Read more

(Mostly) DIY Kitchen Transformation

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Ignore the mess, it's a big-enough task to keep that center island clean. Jacob was off to the side waiting to put some balsa glider parts on it.
Our kitchen as of April 2015. Ignore the mess, every time we prepare a meal things just seem to explode. Jacob was off to the side waiting to put some balsa glider parts on the clean island.

We are embarking on our next DIY project over the next few months. Our plan is to make phased improvements to our kitchen between now and the end of 2015. We’re taking our time on this, in part so we can save up money and pay cash for each phase, but also because we have to fit the DIY tasks in between our busy work schedules.

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Major Mom’s Back to Basics Campaign: Homemade Corn Tortillas

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No, not pretty, but so tasty!
No, not pretty, but so tasty!

My husband and I made a radical change to our diets this new year. We are attempting a Gluten-Free lifestyle. We aren’t allergic to gluten, but we are trying to see if some lingering ailments subside: joint discomfort, congestion, and (for Dave) IT band problems. I’ve not had arthritis in my hands or knees for the past week (a problem I’ve had in cold climates for many years) so I think we might be on to something.

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Searching for that Perfect Cup…Without So Much Garbage

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I “won” this Keurig Elite from the HSC Charity Auction last fall.

Like millions of other Americans, we have become Keurig customers.  It’s like a revolution in coffee…Keurigs give you a “perfect” cup of coffee with very little work.  The American dream, right?

We got our first Keurig, a “Mini“, just before we moved from Nebraska to Florida in fall 2010.  After the movers took our regular coffee pot, it was a nice way to keep having our coffee in the morning.  It’s small and we didn’t have to keep coffee grounds on hand, just a box (or two) of K-Cups and some disposable coffee cups. That one ended up in Dave’s office.  We like how it turns itself off after the cup of coffee brews.  We get a bit paranoid about coffee pots being left on.

This past fall we got one for the home.  It’s been great.  When you register your machine with Keurig, you get coupons for free K-Cups.  BOGO for 2 boxes of 48 K-Cups.  This was a great deal after Christmas when the Starbucks K-Cups became available online.

K-Cup-brewed coffee is delicious and perfect every time.  No doubt there.

My conundrum: K-Cups are very wasteful and are expensive.  After all, traditional coffee pots brew through compostable coffee filters and then you can go on to compost the spent coffee grounds.

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It’s Pac Man!!!

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Thankfully I saw replacements for this at Kohl’s this past weekend! (Yes, I have yellow plates. This is Fiestaware, and I have place settings in green, purple, yellow and burgundy.)This is a by-product of the frequent moves. Things can break…and they do. Several of my kitchen tools have broken, and our scanner has a huge … Read more