Kitchen Update: Part I

It's no secret that one of my least favorite parts of this house was is the kitchen.  It wasn't horrible (especially considering some of the kitchens we saw house-hunting...eek...talk about weird smells), but the paint job was just atrocious and it had obviously not seen a lot of love with the previous owners.  It's actually a decent size, but the layout is awkward and I don't like how it opens right through to the laundry room.

We've been going back and forth with what to do with the kitchen.  Down the road, we'd love to do a total kitchen renovation - new cabinets, counter tops, blow out some walls and close off others - the works.  However, given that this kind of reno is way outside our scope of expertise, it's not going to come cheap.  We've very conscious of the volatile housing market (we bought our house for $245,000 LESS than it sold for at the beginning of 2007), and we're almost certain this is not our "forever" home, so we're constantly weighing how much money we want to put into particular projects. 

We realize it's important to love the house we're living in, but it's also important for us to not spend all of our money on renovations that may amount to a sunken cost.  Given that the kitchen is functional as-is, we have to really make sure we're going to get at least a partial return our investment before we blow a few months salary on a full kitchen renovation.

That said, in the first 6 months or so we lived here, we've been toying with the idea of doing a kitchen face lift - new cabinet hardware, a coat of paint, and some easy fixes.  We already got a shiny new faucet when the old one crapped out on me during some late night painting during our first few weeks of home-ownership, so that was already $450 down the drain in spiffing up the kitchen - although I must admit, the new faucet looks MUCH better.

I sound like a crazy person, but one night in July I had a dream that we re-finished the kitchen cabinets, and it convinced me to move forward.  Somehow a dream was all I needed to kick my butt into gear and get moving. 

I'm going to be blogging about the kitchen facelift among a few posts since there's a lot of pictures, so I thought I'd start with the obvious - before pictures:

I'm not sure if these cabinets are original to the house, but they're pretty old.  And, the previous owners decided to paint them with a horrifyingly ugly paint treatment.  Thanks guys.  I tell people this and they never believe me from the pictures - but the paint was BAD.  It made me never want to go in the kitchen - I seriously didn't cook a meal in this kitchen for the first few months we lived here.  Oops.

  

The glass knobs were also just really not my style.  Plus they were super dingy.  Yuck.

We bought the fridge, which we love, at a great discount before we moved in, but it looks just a little out of place in the otherwise icky kitchen.  

The tile floors actually seem pretty new, so I don't even want to imagine what the floor looked like before that.  The tiles aren't totally my style, but they've decent.  Oh, and if you want to be really grossed out, shortly after this photo was taken I realized the floor grout isn't actually black, it's light brown.  It was that dirty.

The old hinges were just BAD.  Super rusty and half of them were bent so the cabinets didn't close properly.

Can you sense the hideousness of the paint??  Can you??

See the new faucet?  Fancy pants.  Also, you can totally tell that we put NO effort into this kitchen.  Thus the mismatched plant pots and crap all over the counters.

 

The over the range microwave doesn't vent properly, so you can sort of see the giant grease stain on the ceiling.  Seriously so gross.  The old owners I guess liked to cook with lots and lots of oil, and there were greasy drips all over the cabinets that took several hours of scrubbing by yours truly.  And see that bottom right cabinet?  The hinge was f-ed so it just refused to close.  Great for my OCD.

That's it for the "before" photos.  I'll be back soon with the progress and stunningly beautiful and life changing (this may be an exaggeration) after photos.

More living room fun

I last shared some living room updates back in July, and we're being doing lots of shopping and tweaking since then.  You've seen my beloved new bar cart, so I thought I'd share some of the other new additions.

I've been searching for something to put over the fireplace forevah.  The room looked super bland without something there, but I'm horribly indecisive.  I was going back and forth between some kind of art/print, or a mirror.  

My mirror hesitation was that I've heard you should always have a mirror reflecting something interesting, and all that's across from the fireplace is our entertainment center, which is not interesting.  In any event, obviously the mirror won out.  I found this big antique gold mirror at the Melrose Trading Post for $60.  I've been hunting places like Ross and TJ Maxx for a big mirror,  but the Trading Post had an amazing selection.  Ooooh actually, I just realized I have pictures of the other mirrors on my phone from texting them to Sean...lemme upload those right quick...

Here are the runners up that I texted to Sean so that he could text me back that he didn't care, just pick a mirror already.

 Ok this is actually the one I bought, in its natural habitat.

I talked to the guy making these cool window pane mirrors about making a custom size for above the mantle.  Obviously I went with something else, but I think I need one of these in my house anyway.  Oooh maybe in the window-less guest room.  Great idea, Julie!

I ultimately decided that a heavy rectangular mirror was more earthquake-friendly than a round one that might roll off the mantle.  And plus some of these sold in the time I was wandering around.

Enough about mirrors, here's some more living room pictures.

Fireplace area taking shape.  I also recently snagged these votives on a naughty insomnia-driven online shopping spree at Urban Outfitters:

I dig them since we love lighting candles and don't have any cute candle holders.  HOWEVER, my biggest complaint is that they are called "Brass Lotus Votives" so I put a VOTIVE candle in them and left them unattended.  However, I guess you are only supposed to put tea lights in them, because everything in a 3-foot radius of these candleholders (floor, curtains, walls) was splattered with bright red candle wax after an hour.  Dammit.

Moving on...

 Mirror detail and a blurry shot of my messy frizzy weekend hair.  I was actually originally considering painting the mirror, but I'm kind of digging the gold.  It's different from  my normal color pallette which is good, I think.

Zoomed out view, with Mabel doozin.

Oh yes, I also purchased these chairs recently (actually, months ago, but I last blogged about the living room in July so as far as you know it's "recently").  They're a slightly older version of the curved upholstered chair from West Elm.  We were in desperate need of some chairs for this area of the living room, so in true Julie fashion I waited until West Elm was having a sale and then showed up to harass the sales people in Santa Monica with a handful of coupons and made them price match the cheaper online price.  Long story short, they were $127.49 each, down from the original price of $199.  I still can't get over how expensive chairs are.  Eeks.

That's all the living room updates for today.  This is the room where we spend most of our waking hours (watching TV and snuggling with the doozins), so it's great to see it finally coming together.

Now if only my dining room table would arrive...the West Elm website still says "expected delivery by November 14, 2011" but since it's November 12, 2011 and no one has contacted me about home delivery on Monday, I'm thinking that is a LIE.

Side effects of watching too much Mad Men

I recently started watching Mad Men on Netflix, and proceeded to blow through the entire four seasons in a just a few weeks.  Sean hates it, so I became best friends with my iPad and started watching an unhealthy amount of TV at every waking hour.

Then, after a few dozen episodes of watching the characters swill drinks and chain smoke in their awesomely retro 1950's offices (not to mention their mostly super cute 1950's clothes), I made a super logical conclusion - I NEEDED to find a bar cart.  Stat. 

It's honestly a little weird how much I started fantasizing about my bar cart.  I had a picture in my head of the perfect mid-century bar cart, stocked with all sorts of sophisticated liquor that I, a sophisticated grown-up, would consume.  Forget girly drinks, I was going to start drinking fancy aged liquor on the rocks.  People would look at me and bask in my sophisticated adulthood.  I'd have friend over and throw cocktail parties, where we could sip martinis and talk about...grown up things.

If I could only find the right bar cart, my life was going to change.  I was convinced.

So, in between Mad Men episodes, I started browsing obsessing the internet for the perfect match.  Here's a few examples of my inspiration:

via etsy

$650

via ebay

$1099

via ebay

$190

All of these options would have worked perfectly.  Problem is, there's no way I was going to spend $1,000+ on a bar cart.  Or honestly, even $100+.  We have too much else to do and buy for this house, and a bar cart is just not something in the "need" column, despite what my inner fantasies might tell me.

So, I did what I do best and started obsessively trolling craigslist for the next best thing.  My searching was largely unsuccessful at first - things were either too expensive, or too hideously ugly.  I had a few "almosts" but nothing I felt strongly enough about to venture out and see.

Then, one day, I came across some craigslist ads for a vintage store in Long Beach called Magnolia and Willow.  Score.  Their pictures weren't that great, but the prices were very reasonable and they seemed to have a decent selection, and I just really had a good feeling about what I might find.

My first free Saturday, I tore myself away from the iPad and headed South on the 405 to check out this little hole in the wall.  And I'm definitely glad I did.  They had a really tremendous selection of all things vintage, and the prices were overwhelmingly reasonable.  I thought things were much more fairly priced than at the flea markets in the area, where people tend to know when they have something cute and price it ridiculously. 

The lady who runs Magnolia and Willow was SUPER friendly.  I found out that it's actually kind of a vintage superstore, and a bunch of sellers sell their stuff at the store, and the owner just collects commissions.  I overheard the owner talking to someone else about how running a store like this was basically her dream and she worked hard to make it a reality.  Very cool.  I think there's actually a few other vintage stores in the Long Beach area that I'll have to check out, but on this particular day my car was already filled with stuff.  More on that later.

As you might have imagined, I found a cart!  Actually, I found a few - there were 2-3 carts at Magnolia and Willoe that would have done the trick, but one in particular caught my eye.  It was a super retro kitchen cart that was covered with a bunch of vintage tool boxes tools, so the lovely owner helped me unbury it once I made my selection.

The price?  A super amazingly reasonable $29.

The problem?  It was a little rough.  

Excuse the picture - it's an iphone shot in the backyard in fading light.  As you can see, my quaint little cart was just a tad beat up and rusty.

I originally thought I'd rock the rusty chic look, but Sean wasn't buying it.  He doesn't always share my creative genius, and he thought this looked like something I pulled out of the garbage (um yeah, I WISH I pulled this out of the garbage).

Plan B = rummage through the garage for some spray paint.  I had found a can of white spray paint and a can of oil rubbed bronze (both Rustoleum) in the garage, and after deliberating for a bit on an all-white cart, I decided to try some kind of two-tone look.

I was so excited and impatient about my purchase that I actually did all the work on this the same afternoon I bought it - thus the fading light in the pictures.

Since the paint was chipped and rusty, I sanded the whole thing with some fine-ish sandpaper to smooth it out, wiped it with a damp cloth to remove the dust, then went to town with a few half-empty cans of spray paint.  I honestly just winged this whole project and it took a total of about an hour. 

My only in-progress picture is this incredible example of my perfectly taped off legs.  AKA, I found some newspaper and taped it on the legs in the sloppiest way possible.

I then did 4-5 coats of verrrrrrrrry thin paint.  I think I'm actually getting the hang of this spray painting thing.  When people say thin coats they mean THIN COATS.  

Through the magic of the internet, and after a day or so drying outside and a few confusing trips to the liquor store, here's what my $29 cart turned into:

Horray!

The top looks black, but it's actually the lovely oil rubbed bronze, so it has a subtle metallic shimmer, like so:

It actually needs another coat of white, but my can of white  spray paint ran out and I haven't gotten around to buying more.

So, that's how my bar cart dream became a reality.  Thrilling stuff.  And, for the record, it's totally turned me into the sophisticated grown up I imagined.  For example, I'm currently writing this post from the couch, wearing sweatpants that are covered in dog hair, the button down I wore to court this morning that I am too tired to change out of, and drinking a Corona. 

A girl can dream, right?

Exercising my patience

I am a horribly impatient person.  Just ask anyone who knows me.  I'll routinely jam insane amounts of furniture into my car just to avoid waiting for home delivery, and Amazon Prime with free 2-day shipping is one of the best things to ever happen to me (although one-day shipping would be even better).

Where am I going with this?

We've been living with the same, slightly sad, Ikea dining table (seen here in our old apartment) since we moved to LA more than four years ago.  This table has actually been awesome and held up remarkably for the price, but I just kept feeling like it was time to move on...and maybe, I don't know, buy a new table that actually has chairs that match.

So, since we got the house I've been scouring all my favorite furniture store websites for a table that would fit the bill.  Our dining area isn't huge, so I knew it couldn't be too big and overwhelm the space.  I also wanted something that was made with real wood (not veneer), and that was fairly chunky and not too modern.  Sean also digs benches instead of chairs, so the perfect table also had to have a matching bench option.

Enter the West Elm Carroll table

I kind of dug it.  And, at $499 for a 66" table, the price wasn't bad either.  But of course, I'm cheap.  Super cheap.  And I know that West Elm tends to cycle through sales, and it couldn't be too long before they had a 15-20% off dining sale, right?  So I waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  Until finally - literally 6 months later - my dream came true and West Elm put all dining on sale for 20% off.  Yayyy!

Like a true nerd, I dragged Sean to the West Elm in Santa Monica the day the sale started, bribing him with promises of dinner.  I wanted to check out the table in person and make sure it was really what we wanted, since it's one of our biggest furniture purchases yet for the new house.  It was great in person, buuuuuut unfortunately I discovered that they don't carry the table in store, so I couldn't just grab the table that night and run.  SAD FACE.  Not just that, but we'd have to pay the insane shipping and delivery charges.  DOUBLE SAD FACE.  And it's on major back order.  BOO.  I tried to convince the West Elm employees to sell me the floor model but they weren't going for it.  They said my only chance of finding one was if someone returned one to the store, so I gave them my name and number, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.  I find the employees at that store to be incredibly apathetic, so I feel like they might have just thrown away my number as soon as I left the store.

Anyway, after a little more deliberation, I placed the order for everything online.    I tried everything I could to get an extra discount - including calling the 1-800 number but no dice.  I did end up signing up for a West Elm credit card (something I never do) to get 10% back in West Elm dollars.  Not too bad I suppose.  

The grand total for the set was $1156.01, which was a little shocking for a cheapo like me.  It was $424 for the table, $228 each for two benches, a whopping $183 for shipping, and $93 sales tax.

So now I wait.

I originally wanted to do half modern chairs and half bench like the pretty picture above, but Sean wasn't down for that idea.  So, I compromised and did 2 benches and no chairs.

The estimated delivery date for the table is November 14, but I've literally been checking the West Elm website every day to see if they change the date.  Dork.  No changes so far.  We actually got the benches a few weeks back, so they've been chilling in our living room awkwardly, waiting for their table.

I'm super excited about how the new table will transform the whole living area, so I'll be sure to update once the table is (FINALLLLLY) delivered.  I also have my eye on a new light fixture for above the table, but the cheapskate in me has to recover a bit before dropping the money on that...

Whoopsie.

I am a terrible blogger. I know, I've said it already...too much work...too much other stuff...too much laziness...blah blah blah.


So, let's just catch up where I left off. I checked out the last pictures I took and there's already so much that's changed since then, buuuut let's just pretend it hasn't! You'll never know.  Unless you're one of our friends who have been over the house lately. And in that case, just pretend to be surprised.


I mentioned in one of my last posts that the other weekend (in June) I went out of town and Sean did an insane amount of work on the house.


The first thing I saw when I got home was the newly stained fence. When last we left off, we had a beautiful but kind of stripe-y redwood fence, like so:

When I got home, I saw this newly stained beauty - he even picked out the paint color all by himself!

He also painted the silver fence support thingies with oil rubbed bronze spray paint, so they look like fancy iron instead of shiny galvanized steel.  Since then we've also added a mail slot cover...and some landscaping...which you'll see eventually, I'm sure.

Random note - the spray paint said it wouldn't adhere properly to galvanized steel, but we tried it anyway and it seems to be working fine.


The fence wasn't the only part of the house that got a fresh coat - Sean also painted the office, including the trim.

I don't have any before pictures that fully express the dingy grossness of the office paint before, but it was bad. Plus we had the little issue of the new dry wall that kind of stuck out a little:

Let's just say it looks a lot better with a coat of paint:

By the way, have I shown you my new lamp yet? I love it!

Oooooh!

The name of this paint color is...I forgot, but it's the color we were originally going to paint the bedroom before we decided it was too dark. I know it doesn't look dark at all, but for some reason our bedroom makes all paint look freakishly darker than it really is.


Moving on to the guest bedroom. This room really gets no love, since it basically serves as our dogs' bedroom. Not that we don't love our dogs, but they don't really have a great sense for decor. There's actually been a lot of recent guest room changes but I don't have pictures yet soooo let's just pretend they didn't happen.


I don't have any good before pictures, but it was the same dingy off-white as in the other rooms.

This paint color was actually a $5 can we got at Home Depot. It ended up being more than $5 because Sean ran out - don't ask me how since this room is so small, I think someone puts their paint on a little too thick - so he had to go back and color match. We originally thought it was gray but it's more of a blue/gray. It works.

Pleaseeee try not to get too obsessed with my decor choices for this room. It's nice, I know.

Here's the new headboard against the new paint. Now all we need is a bed. Minor details.

Aaaand with the beautiful window treatments. Oh god this room is so bad.


Let's move on! Who remembers the BRIGHT GREEN bathroom?!?

IT'S NOW WHITE

YAY!


I'm still not entirely convinced that this shade of bright white is the right color for the bathroom given the other random colors in there, but it definitely works for now! We're still using up our million cans of $5 white paint, so this was a cheap project as well.


I think that's it for Sean's crazy insane weekend. We're now done painting the entire interior of the house, except for any tweaks or changes we may do...and except for the kitchen which has been painted but you don't know that it's been painted because I haven't blogged about it yet.


Time to sign off because I'm sleepy, but stay tuned for my next blog post (in 3 months).

Living Room Update (and more craigslist shopping)

I realized that I've never really focused a post on the status of our living room, except for some little snippets and of course the lovely "before" photos.

Ick!

Since then, we've been slowly painting, adding furniture, hanging curtains, and all that fun stuff to make the main living space look less like a house that was on the market for a year, and more like our own space.

Our most recent addition is this media center from Crate and Barrel.  Our old media stand, which you can see in the picture from our old apartment below, was too short and chunky and didn't fit the space.

My absolute dream media stand is a custom wall unit like this one that Morgan over at The Brick House designed, but I'm too chicken to drill into the wall and floors like that.  I'm also not sure it would be a great idea since our walls are pretty fragile plaster.

In any event, I had a bunch of the Crate and Barrel Sloane furniture in our old apartment, and I liked it.  Not love, but like.  It's a good blend of form and function, and pretty budget friendly.  Well, if you're like me and buy everything on craigslist anyway.   I also love the Sloane collection because it's ridiculously easy to disassemble and transport in a small car.

When I saw that there was a Sloane media stand available, I thought I'd check it out. 

Photo credit: crateandbarrel.com

My first step was to sell all of our old Sloane furniture on craigslist, since they were all an older model than the media stand and the pieces wouldn't have matched up.  I sold 2 of our leaning bookshelves, plus 2 leaning desks and our old media stand, for a total of about $500 cash money - which left us plenty of money to play around with to assemble our new media stand.

Luckily, I found the media stand and one bookshelf on craiglist (in almost-new condition!) for $225.  That's almost a 60% discount without even factoring in tax and shipping.  Score!  We took a nice trip up to Hollywood to grab the loot, and happily loaded everything in my little Volvo 240 (with room to spare!).

After dealing with a lopsided media center for a few weeks, I couldn't find a matching bookshelf on craigslist - or at least not one in my price range that we could snap up quick enough.  Luckily, we have mad connections, and we were able to purchase the second bookshelf from a friend who works at Crate and Barrel for around $100,

Between craigslist and discounts, our grand total for the media center was about $325 - or more than $300 less than if we'd bought straight from the store. 

My favorite part about craigslist shopping, other than the obvious cheapness, is that I always feel like if I can sick of something I can easily re-sell it and make my money back.  If I tire of this media center and want to try something new, I'm pretty confident I can make my money back by re-selling and move on to the next thing.

So, that's how we got our new media stand.

Mabel approves. 

(I also don't know if I've mentioned that we put down Flor tiles in the living room, which the lovely Mabel is modelling.  I have a love-hate relationship with Flor, so I think I'll keep this topic for another post.)

We were able to hide all of the cables in a spare box from Ikea, because the clutter was driving me crazy. 

Translation: I made Sean do this because the clutter was driving me crazy.  The amount of wires around our media center is insane, we have way too many gadgets.  I worry a little that this may start a fire, but at least there's less clutter.

Another view, couch included.  I literally just threw random things on the shelves after we assembled them, so I'm currently working on making them more aesthetically pleasing.

View of the fireplace area, and an Ernie doozin.  This room is shaped for an awkward setup, so right now I'm envisioning a separate sitting area near the fireplace, and a TV area where the TV is currently set up.  I'm not sure anything else really makes sense but if you have brilliant ideas please share them.

View from the dining area.  That's our old coffee table currently doubling as a behind-the-couch console table. 

There's plans in the works for a DIY console table I'm pretty excited about, but it will have to wait for a weekend when I do something other than sit on my butt and read books and drink beer.

Same view, 100% more doozin. 

Please also notice the light fixture.  When we moved in there was a hole in the wall in that location with wires hanging out, which you can spot in the before photos above.  It wasn't a great look. 

I probably searched for about 100 hours of my life (that I will never get back) for a suitable replacement.  I looked at a million fixtures and couldn't find a single one I liked, or that I thought would look good without a pair - due to the spacing of this one, another light on the other side of the archway would look funny.  I found one I liked from Schoolhouse electric (this one), but it was $169 and Sean didn't like it.

Then, at a lighting outlet on my birthday (I'm cool like that), I found the fixture we ended up buying. 

It's an outdoor fixture. 

It was $30. 

I love it. 

It also ended the constant strain on my marriage from my inability to choose a light fixture which my husband could not understand.  Perfect!  Click on the picture above to zoom in on my lovely new light fixture...you know you want to!

Another angle, more doozins.  I was going to hang that mirror above the fireplace, then I didn't, so it's just hanging out awkwardly for now waiting for a home.  Ignore the dining area, it needs work.

That's the living room for now!  We definitely need to keep tweaking, but for now it's a comfortable space to hang out and we're not embarrassed to have people over which is a plus.