Kitchen overhaul Part 3

We still haven't been able to decide on a paint color, but we have made the decision to bring some color into our kitchen by hanging some artwork. We chose red, yellow, green and brown as our accent colors because they pop nicely and contrast our white walls.




We purchased this Ribba frame at Ikea, where we also found these Kort postcards. I thought they would look nice in the kitchen and I like the colors.




I found these pictures on sale in a small local store and I immediately fell in love with them.

Then I decided to inject some color into our bookcase turned buffet.



Now the open shelves of the buffet hold a colorful variety of stuff. My cookbooks and collected recipes, fresh fruit and my food scale, often-used cooking utensils, part of my tea collection, sugar, salt and flour, our watering can, cat kibble, candy for our neighbor's kids and some decorative stuff. Among the decor, there is a DIY aroma dispenser, which can me made in about two minutes (tutorial found here).

There will be more changes as soon as we find the time to work on them, so stay tuned!

Kitchen overhaul Part 2

In my last post I already talked about switching tables and adding storage, the next step was to was to make some changes to our seating.

I bought the chairs and the table as a matching set 4 years ago. I honestly didn't like the look of it, but I was a college freshman and didn't have a whole lot of money to spend. I got it for 90 bucks and that worked for me, so I chose to ignore the fact that I hated orange - the color in which the chairs were upholstered.



Once I owned the chairs, I quickly discovered that they weren't very comfortable and that they attracted dust and cat hair like crazy. I guess that was due to the weird fabric they were upholstered with. I've cleaned them once a week ever since, but it was a pretty pointless chore with two black cats who loved to sleep on those chairs. So this is what they usually looked like when I cleaned them.

Eww that's all the dirt that accumulates during one week

A few days ago, I talked to my neighbor and told her how much I hated my chairs. She told me that she actually had two unused Ikea chairs in her basement and said that we could have them. Yay! So now we have two of these bad boys and two of our old chairs.

Then I decided that I wanted our old chairs to look better because they appeared downright crappy next to the Ikea chairs. I made the decision to upholster them with some new fabric after finding this tutorial on Young House Love, which incidentally is one of my favorite blogs. Go check them out NOW!

We went to Ikea to get this fun fabric and I got to work. First, I gathered everything I needed on the table and armed myself with my trusty staple gun.



Then I unscrewed the seat bottom, laid it out on the fabric and cut the fabric accordingly. Afterwards I made sure that everything was wrinle-free and that the pattern looked good, and then I got to stapling. The corners were the hardest part in this project and after I was done, I screwed the seat bottom back on. I snapped a quick before and after shot when I was done with the first chair and then I continued my work.



After finishing the second chair, I stood back and admired my work. I have to admit that I'm proud of it. It isn't perfect, but not too shabby for a first try. What do you guys think?

Kitchen overhaul Part 1

We moved into our current apartment about a year ago, but it still doesn't really feel like home to me and there are a lot of things I'm not satisfied with.

I've only lived here since July 2009 because I went to college elsewhere and only spent some of the weekends at our place. Once of the things that bug me is the fact that all of our walls are white. The previous tenant had painted the whole apartment black - even the ceilings! Our landlord put up wallpaper to cover it up before we moved in, but it was some cheap stuff in a greyish brown color that needed to be painted.


Here's an example of what our walls looked like when we moved in

The only thing that had been painted were the ceilings. But the painters had done an awful job at that as you can see in the pictures. So the first thing we had to do was paint all the walls in a 690 square feet apartment. Our apartment building is from 1910, so the ceilings are high, which made the task even more daunting. We bought quality paint and still had to paint the walls four times to cover the nasty wallpaper up.

I had originally planned to paint the rooms in different colors, but we were really annoyed with the whole thing and college was about to start, so we left them white. Now, one year later, there's still no change. I already collected some paint swatches, but before I can make any decision as to which colors work best, I'll have to convince my fiancé that painting is absolutely necessary...

However, I decided that we needed some new furniture for our kitchen. We're on a budget, so I looked for stuff on sale. We needed more storage in the kitchen, and then I found this beauty on sale at Ikea.



It's actually supposed to be a bookcase, but we're using it as a buffet. We were originally looking at this one this one and this one this one , but they are more expensive over here in Germany and we simply couldn't afford them. I like this one too, and now I'm thinking about painting it white to tie it in with the rest of our white kitchen.

We also bought a new kitchen table. Our old table was too big for our kitchen because it was located in the center of the room and I needed space to move around. Most of our friends don't live in this city anymore and we hardly ever entertain, so we decided we needed a smaller table.

Note: Please ignore my messy kitchen! We're in the process of overhauling several rooms right now and there's stuff everywhere. I tried to take the pictures without showing too much of the mess, but it simply wasn't possible...


This was our old rectangular table

As you can see, our old table wasn't huge, but we needed something even smaller. So this is the new one:



It's 30"x30" and this square shape works a lot better in our kitchen. And it's still big enough to fit 4 chairs! What I also love about it, is that it offers additional storage as it has 6 drawers. There are 4 small drawers on one side and 2 big ones on the other.



This is it for now, but I'll be back soon with part 2 of the overhaul!