My Vintage Style Kitchen Makeover, finished at last!

If you have been following my last few posts then you will know my finances are zeroed at the minute and that I've been re-doing my small Belfast kitchen with 15yr old paint (remarkably still useable after a good stir with a stick). Now it's finished! I'm relieved, relaxed and much more happy with my workspace. I really hadn't realised the effect the décor had on me before I got stuck in with the paintbrush. I under-estimated the 'feel-good' factor of a pleasant and fresh looking kitchen. I'm really glad I did it :)

And here is the reason why....... bless this house, or demolish it. It's pretty obvious just how long I'd been avoiding this space. Too much going on elsewhere in my life to be launching into it willy-nilly, but eventually things change and I finally had a bit of time to get motivated and start freshening things up.

Cluttered and dull. Before pics.

 

I have no idea how this happened!

 





 

Pretty dated and much abused I'm sorry to say, believe it or not it was clean, just completely knackered! And my work surfaces.....well they looked like this......

I have no idea what kind of stone effect this was supposed to be, except dirt coloured.

 

Needless to say I was pretty ashamed and fairly dubious about going into the kitchen to cook and bake (which I love to do!) let alone let my family or even a tradesperson in through the door :( lol!

So I got creative, my budget being about 50 quid ha ha ha! You might have spotted the wooden blind I had hanging at the window but pulled up from the first kitchen picture, well I got it down and started to cut it up, re-purposing the slats by sticking them on the cabinet fronts with extra strong diy adhesive! I was going to have panelled doors I decided!

 

 

So onwards I charged! Having little to no choice on my paint colour, relying on the 15yr old stash from the shed I mixed up some homemade chalk paint which meant no need for an expensive primer to undercoat and made the bold decision to go deep blue on the cabinets! My miniscule budget shrank a little when I bought some white emulsion, clear varnish and a plain white roller blind from Argos. I think I had about a tenner left at that stage. I bought some paper napkins off eBay and four roles of washi tape to co-ordinate with my new blue units.

The work tops took a bit of working out, I had a real longing to have a faux marble effect kitchen surface and after watching a You Tube tutorial I had a go, using my white paint as a base and some acrylic paint from my art supplies for the marbled veining effect.

A success but too much colour!

 

It looked pretty good! BUT...............as I proceeded around the kitchen work surfaces the further I got with the effect, the LOUDER the effect got. By the time I got to the opposite end of the kitchen my eyes felt sore! I just knew that I wouldn't be looking forward to putting the kettle on first thing in the morning if |I had to face my faux marble, so I painted over it! A small delay but necessary to avoid headaches later ;)!

The never ending supply of 15yr old paint from my shed delivered a lovely peachy/coral emulsion which I made lighter with some of my big bargain bucket of white paint and this easily covered the  dark walls. What remained of the white cleaned up the ceiling and then the last drops were mixed up as homemade chalk paint and used to base coat the grotty floor tiles! Phew.....just a bit of work involved in this room! I painted my Dualit toaster and my kettle, my wine rack, a chandelier light fitting that belonged to my Mum, some folding wooden chairs bought second hand for a tenner for both about a year ago, and I even painted the cheapo roller blind from Argos with a wild Ikat design! All the napkins were used to decoupage my plain white wall tiles and I used the washi tape as a border, then sealed with clear varnish. I did exactly the same on the kitchen floor. All the cabinets were waxed after painting and I painted my door knobs with nail varnish (there is a nice pic of those on the last post I put up). I even used an old ornate frame to make a chalkboard (I've saved the mirror for it in case I change my mind later!). I got my spice cabinet on the wall and that pretty much wrapped it all up.

Oh, the doilies I got 3 for £2.20 on eBay from a lovely seller in Alicante in Spain which I displayed in some second hand frames bought from charity shops and painted white. I think I'll add more to the collection whenever I get a bit of extra cash again!

Just take a look! Its a  very vintage feel, but its soooooo much better than it was, even if I had to work with paint that I just had stored away I still think it turned out great! I hope you do too :)



Hand-painted Ikat blind in co-ordinating colours a big £15.99 from
my tiny budget!!

Chalkboard

Panelled chalk painted doors and plain white counter tops.

Hand painted drawer knobs.

Panelled drawers.

 

I painted the plastic components on the kettle and toaster to match

I miss-matched the paper napkins and washi tape to try and create a vintage delft style on the wall tiles and floor.

This covered dish was only £2.95 from a local charity shop and its so pretty :)

Vintage doilie and china dish :)

I installed a 'new' light fitting to fit in with the vintage feel of the kitchen.

I took one of the cabinet doors away completely, to make a space
 for my biggest basket which now holds my spuds and onions,
 with room below for some of my cookbooks

I put some hooks on the wall to hang folding chairs on when they are not being used,
 and my little folding table easily fits two for breakfast!

 

My special floor :) Its a random decoupage patchwork of miss-matched napkins.
Any of the napkins that tore I just patched in so you can see some difference in tones in places,
 but to be honest it doesn't detract from the over all effect :)
 

Well that's the kitchen tidy! Its less of a chore to wash up the dirty dishes these days and a bit more of a pleasure so I think its been a successful little project....so what's next?????.......actually its my front door, hallway, stairs and landing! First impressions count, right?
:)

lots of love

Samantha x.

Ps, apologies again for light changes making pictures brighter or duller etc. Belfast weather plays havoc and changes every half hour at this time of year. Also all my pics are phone pics! Maybe one day I'll have a decent camera ;)



 



Sneaky Peek ( the kitchen!)

So it's been weeks since I posted, but no slacking. The kitchen is nearly finished. The cabinets have all been up-styled and a new vintage feel look is coming together. All using my 'elderly' paint from the dark corners of my garden shed. It's not the colour scheme I would chose if I had any cash but as things go I can't complain :).  At the minute I'm painting the floor, awkward.....you bet! I'm doing it a section at a time so I can still access food and coffee (I couldn't face the idea of keeping the kettle and a selection of Pot Noodles stashed in a corner of the lounge!). Full blog post coming soon. I'm hoping everyone has a wonderful Easter and get stuck into those chocolate eggs folks ;)
The pics are of some of my crazy new kitchen bits and bobs. I bought 10 plain white B&Q value knobs and had a little artsy sesh with some nail  polish enamel, trying to replicate the feel those gorgeous ceramic knobs that cost about £2.50 each. Another pic is of a charity shop bargain that's going to be home for my essential kit of herbs and spice jars!
And lastly some Washi tape, useful for lots of little projects, wait and see......
Happy Easter :)
S.

All About The Pussy Cat Post!

I know this is a filler post, an in betweener while I blast ahead with the kitchen but it's also my little baba :). Bless his socks! He's a sweetie and a complete psycho, we have a love/hate thing (all coming from him though, I just keep on with the love!) and this is a wee tribute post to him prior to his 4th birthday in March. An arty b/w collection of intimate portraits of Nyah at his most seductive......and not racing round the lounge trying to kill invisible enemies or my tootsies!
Love you Baba Nyah!!! xxx.

Terrific Terrariums - Tiny (and not so tiny!) Tropical Gardens for your Home.

 It's certainly been a chilly start to the year but I'm turning the heat up (literally, lol!) and creating some tropical green goodies to brighten my home by making some Terrariums. For those not in the know a terrarium is a glass container filled with tiny plants that do well in a humid, moist environment, although you can adapt your terrarium by using different types of soil to suit different plants, say by using more sandy composite you could create a cacti terrarium. Easy peasy :)

This idea has been trending high on Pinterest with gorgeous geometric shaped glass houses made with copper and brass frames adorning many a discerning designer coffee table or kitchen. 

I can't afford that kind of stuff but what I have got is a collection of vases and jars that I had used for lots of different purposes at one time or another displaying fairy lights and junky/cool ideas like that. After I had cleared out the fairy lights and raided my loft I ended up with three containers, and a Douwe Egberts coffee jar without the lid.

Other bits you need are compost obviously, and pebbles or stones, even glass or ceramic beads for drainage placed at the bottom of your container.

These are also useful for surrounding you plants at soil level to help keep moisture in the soil and therefore creating a humid environment for those tropical plants. You can also add a layer of sand on top of the drainage pebbles, this means if you over water, the soil will not wash down into the bottom of your container (I skipped this as I'm watering with a mist/spray and it shouldn't be an issue) it also looks good as you get that lovely layered effect, so by all means fire ahead if that's the look you prefer!. I'll list the plant names at the bottom for you, so read on folks ;)

So its basically layering - pebbles, sand (optional), compost, then the plants go in, then add more pebbles.

The other thing I bought, purely for decorative reasons was some gorgeous aubergine coloured artificial Reindeer moss.

Why artificial?

Why coloured?

Why Reindeer Moss?

Artificial, because I'm not after a spreading plant like moss after all my hard work! Too fiddly to try to control!

Coloured, because it adds another dimension to the terrarium, creating contrast!

Reindeer moss, because it has a wonderful foamy structure and almost looks like coral except that it is soft and sponge-like to the touch.

 I did a little research online about how much plants would cost and what sorts of plants are classed as 'terrarium' plants and quickly found that yet again eBay was much cheaper than pretty much anywhere else and with a wide variety of plants. I'm not put off ordering from eBay for plants, I did this last year and found a seller where I bought both a young quince and a jasmine plant for a really good price, after having been unable to buy them at any of my local suppliers. Both of which arrived in good time and  were well packaged. They now seem happy and at home in my small garden. I'll be sure to update you in spring, but certainly they had established themselves well by autumn last year and I'm waiting for them to really take off this year (gardening - not instant gratification by any means!).

I'm waiting for a delivery of a Tigers Tooth Aloe plant, which is so pretty, it has white stripes on its green leaves and little white, pointy ends like teeth. Perfectly named!

It will be living in our teeny coffee jar terrarium on the far right!

And the tall thin elegant vase in the middle is hopefully going to be the home of a miniature orchid, I love orchids :). As soon as they arrive I'll plant them up and update this post so that all Terrarium content stays in the one post.

So that's how I spent my pocket money this month folks, I'll try not to kill them and I'll post some progress pics in a few months time. 

Before I forget water/mist weekly and feed every 6-8 weeks. 

lots of love,

Samantha x

January Junky Gems Transform to Fashionable Furniture!

Ok, so January is swiftly departing, can you believe how quickly it went? If you are like me then it flashed by and boy was it a cash strapped month. So it was even more important to make every penny count.

So I got my thinking hat on and my gloves and braved the icy depths of the garden shed to see what paint and other bits I had stashed that I could get to grips with. I struck it lucky! I had 15 year old emulsion paint all stacked in the back behind the lawnmower and the BBQ. What joy! Only one of the cans contained a colour that I had used myself the others had been donated as leftovers over the years by my family after house moves and decor changes. So with  hope and trepidation I hauled the cans up to the kitchen and pried the rusty cans open. And joy again! Yes they had certainly thickened over the decade or so they when out there in the shed with the spiders and bugs but with some water added and a good mix they returned to a fluid, usable state pretty quickly. So a small fortune saved right there! I also raked out my collection of wicker baskets I had built up over the years (and a couple from Mum too), I had always found them a little hard to place in the flat before but inspiration was firing on all cylinders so they made their way upstairs too.

The baskets after a bit of a dust.

 I decided quite early on that I what I wanted was a clean fresh look for my redecoration plans, no matter which room I went into I needed to lighten and whiten and with that thought in mind I mixed up some white chalk paint with a half a can of white emulsion that had come up from the shed. Whoop! I was back in action with a brush :)!

So much cleaner and a uniform colour makes then look like a set, rather than a raggedy collection, I'm very happy with these so far!

So what else could I get up too with my freshly mixed chalk paint? Well I turned my attention to a little wooden trolley table that I had stashed in the kitchen to use for breakfast. It's really a handy wee item but had really seen better days and it travelled up from Mums to mine to be used much as it had been at her home, everything from a potting table, painting surface and somewhere to stack tools amongst others. I'm sorry but I forgot to take a before pic I just got stuck in!

It came up a complete treat! Pleased as punch but really needed to give it a bit of a colour boost so I made up some little tester pot sized coloured chalk paints and after struggling with the 'should it be stripes/should it plaid' thing in my head, I decided it should be stripes as it would make the table top look bigger and longer. I masked it off with frog tape and away I went....

The first stripe! A lovely coral/peachy tone.....but wait that wasn't all! More taping and more chalk paint followed. I have to say its a satisfying thing peeling off the tape to reveal nice sharp lines, I think that was my favourite decorating moment because basically painting is a messy job.

 

And so I reached the zenith of stripes for my small table,for not another stripe could be placed on its little top.

Optimum Stripe Level A

This is where it will live for a short while until I get started on the kitchen when it will return home to be used at breakfast and lunch times once more :)

So no pennies spent at all on these little up-do's and there's my Mums' rabbit from her garden which found its ears repaired and chalk painted white and now it lives indoors and spooks the cat out.

There's more to come, the baskets aren't finished yet, I want to make some fabric liners and some ceramic content  plaques for them and I'll certainly share my efforts with that little project too

Other than that I no longer have a sofa, well to cut a long story short after Mum came home from hospital it was decided by the occupational therapist that a riser/recliner would be more useful so I broke the sofa into two parts and ditched the larger three-seater part to make room but the new chair didn't arrive in time :(. So now I have masses of space and the corner where the sofa was has been completely freed up so I did this (see below). The storage boxes were £2.99 each from B&M and they hold so much of fabric stash and crafty bits, they were the cheapest on the market and I think they look great, it certainly makes a big difference to the room. The unit was a cheap pine thing bought from B&Q years back just to fill the alcove and create some shelves behind the sofa.

Other things that I completed but didn't get a chance to post because of everything that was happening with Mum, were the large MCM (Mid Century Modern) cupboards and shelves that I already had but that needed some tlc to get them back to good nick. So after a light sand with a very fine grain sandpaper, this removed all the old dirt and any oils previously used, I then gave it two coats of Danish Oil and chalk painted selected areas to give them just the lightest of 're-style's :) They came up so beautifully and they really glow.

I'm such a nerdy, I colour coordinated my cd's!

I also used the very last scraps of MDF from my shelving project to create a little U shaped TV stand that runs the same length as the cabinet, which gave me somewhere to stash the DVD player and the Sky box and freed up counter space.

 This little success gave me the confidence to get stuck into the vintage dining table and chairs using the same techniques and style. 

The Danish Oil was around £5 from B&Q and made such a difference to the teak wood. Its a pleasure to polish!

WOW, this is the longest post I've put out in a while!

So I have been embroidering quietly in the evenings too. It just seems to relax me :) so that can be no bad thing. Seeing as I no longer have a sofa I can't really go any further with my living room, it will have to wait until I am able to afford it, unless I strike it mega lucky and find the perfect vintage sofa and armchairs! Who knows? In the meantime I'm moving on to the kitchen because I have all that old paint and I know that I can pull it off on a shoe string budget, I'll show you how I'm  doing on that really soon.

Have a look at my embroidery in the meantime, this pretty little piece is to be made into a lavender pillow,lavender is used therapeutically to aid restful sleep it also happens to be a gorgeous, clean, floral scent and my favourite besides jasmine! I'll be sure to blog the finished piece for you :)

I hope you enjoyed this one, lol! That's everything up to date now, but as always there's so much more to come,

lots of love,
Samantha x