Moving Right Along

Oh Happy Day! It is Friday and the weather is glorious today. I am thinking that I need to find a way to take my projects out on the front porch so that I can enjoy the weather that much more...
In the meantime I thought I would move along and begin posting pictures of the next room I decided to do after the entryway.... the kitchen. Yes, I said the kitchen.  I must say that there was not a whole lot going right with the kitchen. While I would have loved the thought of replacing the cabinets and moving some things around in the process, reality set in and I had to be more realistic.  I was going to have to dig deep and come up with some creative ways to remodel.  My first biggest accomplishment in the kitchen was an area over the kitchen sink which was very plain.  

Before 

After

Close-up of detail

In order to complete this project I found some scrap tiles and some mosaic glass that my mother-in-law had given me a long time ago.  I measured out and realized that I did not have quite enough tiles to do the entire area so I improvised some more.  I found some scrap plywood that I had in the garage and had it cut down to the size I needed.  To give the board some texture and conceal the fact that it was just a simple piece of plywood, I used some spackling compound and covered the face of the board and let it dry.  I put a couple of coats of primer and then painted the blue background.  Once the paint dried I penciled on the sunflower design and began painting away.  I mounted it on the wall above the sink once it was completely dry.  Then came my first attempts at tiling.  I have heard horror stories and was a little nervous about it, but other than being a bit time consuming I enjoyed it.  Fortunately my mother-in-law loaned me her tiling tools and spacers so all I had to buy was the adhesive and the grout.  I went with a black grout in hopes that it would help bring out some of the colors in the tile and glass design. Once I was happy with the results I sealed the painting and then sealed the grout. I definitely can't say that the space is plain and boring anymore.  As you can see in the sides of the "After" picture, I painted the exterior of the cabinets a golden cream color and then painted the insides of the cabinets red. Next week I will post what I am doing with the cabinet doors.
I have decided to take a break from blogging over the weekend.  I plan to spend some much needed time with the Hubby and also to try to figure out how to make my own embroidery designs using my mother-in-laws Pfaff Creative Vision. 

Here's Hoping for a Wonderful Weekend!