Guess what?

It’s ANOTHER post about my kitchen.

I’m on a roll!

Unfortunately, it’s really so bad that all these projects are only making a tiny dent in the ugliness.

But a tiny dent is better than no dent. Right?

And today’s dent is definitely not tiny. In fact, I think it’s pretty big.

You see, there’s this area of my kitchen you don’t see often. Because it’s embarrassing. And ugly. And so horrible that I really just want to pretend like it doesn’t exist.

THAT TILE. Seriously? Who picks that tile?

(If any of you happen to adore that tile, please know I do not judge you for it, and I’m sorry for being so mean to it. It’s just really ugly.)

Funny story about the tile: When we were first showing this house to my parents right after we bought it, we were all standing in the kitchen and I made a (very sarcastic) comment about how the tile was my favorite part of the house. My mom replied (in a very NOT sarcastic manner) that she was sure we could track down some more of it so that we could continue it throughout the rest of the kitchen.

I love that woman, but she’s slow to pick up on the sarcasm sometimes. Don’t know how she managed to birth two of the most sarcastic people in existence.

Anyways. I hate the tile. Eventually we’re going to give this kitchen a complete gut job and basically start from scratch, but considering we just paid an arm and a leg (and maybe a kidney or two) for our new windows (which are getting installed NEXT WEEK!) and our garage renovation (which is slow going, but I’ll have updates soon!), it’s not going to be in the cards for us anytime soon.

So, I decided to go for a quick fix.

Check it out! It’s not blindingly awful! It’s white! And crisp! And clean! And, dare I say, PRETTY!

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while but have been waiting to track down the tile paint kit that Home Depot is supposed to carry (but doesn’t actually carry because I can’t find it anywhere). So, finally I broke down and decided to just paint the dang stuff with regular paint. I used Zinsser primer (which is the only stuff I’ll ever use) and regular old white paint. It’s probably not the most durable solution, and probably not what I was “supposed” to use…but it worked and I love it. So I’m just gonna roll with it.

There’s no real tutorial here – I just painted it like I’d paint anything else. I was a little worried after the first coat of primer, because things weren’t looking so hot.

I decided to just power through it, though, and I’m glad I did. I figured it couldn’t look any worse than the fruit, so there was no reason to stop. After the second coat, I had higher hopes…

And after one more coat of primer and two coats of paint (yes, this took a lot of coats!) it was looking pretty amazing.

I’m so glad I decided to risk it and try this project…I love how it turned out and it makes that whole little area feel much less cluttered and awful. I probably wouldn’t try this technique on an area that gets foot traffic or that needs to be cleaned super frequently because I’m not sure how the paint will hold up, but this little area stays pretty clean and doesn’t get messed with very often, so I have high hopes it’ll last us until we can rip it all out and replace it!

Have you painted anything unique lately?

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When Corey and I originally moved into this house over a year and a half ago (!), I honestly thought we would never use the little breakfast nook in the kitchen.

I mean, honestly. We’d lived in nothing but tiny apartments that didn’t even technically have dining rooms, so it felt downright luxurious to not only have the most giant dining room in the history of the world (our dining room table is 104 inches long!) but to also have a breakfast nook larger than any other dining area we’d ever had.

If I’m being honest, it seemed a bit overkill.

BUT!

After living here for over a year and a half (!), I have grown to adore our little breakfast nook. We use it all the time. Corey eats breakfast here daily, and we sit down to a big breakfast here every single Saturday morning.

And guess what? We use the dining room too!

I still feel a little silly saying that we actually need two separate dining spaces, but, um, we do now.

It’s so nice to have this little area in the kitchen to plop down for a quick breakfast or lunch (or just do get some work done), but to also have the giant dining table for when we have guests or want to sit down and have a nice dinner at home together.

So, in summary, we love the breakfast nook. And, really, it’s the only area in the kitchen that actually feels kind of “complete”. We think the furniture in this little area is perfect, and it’s really come together nicely over the last few months.

But, can we talk about those chairs?

Ugh. I love them so much it’s almost embarrassing, but that fabric? HOT MESS. I actually like the color, but it’s gross, dirty, and completely falling apart.

Cute, right?

We’ve been meaning to recover them for forever, but I have had complete design paralysis when it comes to actually choosing a fabric. Should I go floral? Graphic? Pop of color? Neutral?

I DON’T KNOW!

After months (and months and months) of indecision, I finally decided it was time to just make a damn decision and go for it. After all, it’s not like it’s particularly difficult to recover them if I hate the fabric I choose.

So, last week  I finally ordered some fabric.

I went with a scallop pattern in navy. It’s more color than a black or gray fabric would have been (and this area definitely needs color) but it’s neutral enough that we can still layer in colorful accessories without worrying about clashing. And, it ties in nicely with the navy chairs in the dining room, which is a win-win for me.

So finally, after owning these babies for more than 6 months, I recovered them this weekend. I’m always tempted to gloss over the steps to recovering chairs, but it’s something I’ve gotten asked about a lot in the past so I’ll go over it again – I promise it’s ridiculously simple.

STEP 1:

Remove the seat part of the chair.

STEP 2:

Remove the old fabric. Curse at the  chair many times while you do this. Remember that this is by far the most difficult part of this process.

It helps if you watch some Vampire Diaries while you do it. Ian Somerhalder makes everything better.

(Ew, Corey’s computer screen is dirty.)

STEP 3:

Cut your fabric to the right size for the chair – leave a few inches on all sides. Lay out the new fabric (iron it first, please!) and plop the seat on top of it.

STEP 4:

Enlist your handsome husband (or wonderful wife, or fantastic friend) to help, because this is a two-person job. I mean, you can do it alone if you want. It’s just easier with someone else.

STEP 5:

Pull the fabric tight on one side. Staple.

STEP 6:

Keep going. Cut off the extra fabric when you’re done. I know that’s not particularly descriptive, but this is one of those things you’ve just gotta learn as you go. It’s like wrapping a present…and just remember that if you mess up, it takes just a few seconds to remove the staple and try it again!

STEP 7:

Put the chair back together and marvel at the amazing job you did.

LOVE.

This might sound dramatic, but I feel like this transforms this entire little nook. The navy goes so well with that dark wood and the gold legs that it makes me a little weak in the knees. And having some pattern over there makes the whole area feel so much more put together and complete.

…now if only we could do something about that terrible floor and wall texture/color.

Oh well, baby steps!

Have you done any small projects that make a huge impact lately?

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So, we have three dogs.

But you knew that, right?

Well, with three dogs running around the house, the only way to keep any sort of order in our home is by controlling them through treats.

Some people call it bribery, I call it behavior training.

Potatoes, po-tah-toes.

Well, our treat jar obviously gets used a lot with three dogs, especially since one of them hates going outside and requires a treat in order to actually go outside ever.

Who is training who, here?

We have a little white ceramic canister that we’ve been using for treats forever, but thanks to our constant treat-grabbing, it’s chipped, dirty, and I was starting to get twitchy having to look at it every single day. So, we decided to grab a new one when we were at Target the other day.

It was super cute, but I’m always intimated by areas with chalkboard paint, because I’m awful at writing with chalk. I could have gotten one of those super awesome chalk markers I’ve been hearing about lately, but I had a box full of Martha Stewart crafting supplies sitting in our guest room from one of the rounds of Creating With the Stars, so I figured I’d try them out on this guy.

I had a ton of stencils and craft paints, but none of the stencils were really well-suited to this particular project. Obviously a little flourish or border wouldn’t really work, and most of the letters were too big to spell anything out. So, I decided to go a little more abstract and use one of the decorative letter stencils to do a “C” – we call our dog treats “cookies” and if we ever change our minds and want to use this for actual cookies, it works too!

It was a very simple project – I used a craft dabber-thingie (that’s the technical term) that I got in my prize package to apply the paint, then I peeled it off…and just like that, I had a cute, customized dog treat container!

And now I don’t have to stare at a plain white, chipped container every day.

Of course, I couldn’t stop there. Now that I had been playing around with it, I couldn’t resist trying another one of the stencils out. I decided to use the old dog treat container – it was already chipped, so if I totally messed it up it wouldn’t be a big deal. And, with a cute stencil it might be salvageable to be re-used for something else.

I went for red this time, and I used a squeegee instead of the dabber-thingie, since the surface area of the stencil I was using was so much bigger. Other than that, the process was the same – stick on, apply paint, peel off.

!!!

I’m obsessed with this stencil and I love how it turned out. I thought about doing more all the way around the jar, but I didn’t want to push my luck, so I stopped there. For now, I have the jar sitting on the console by our front door, but who knows where it’ll land eventually…all I know is it’s officially cute again and I want to display it!

Of course, now that I’ve discovered the awesomeness hidden in my Martha Stewart craft box, I’m going to have a hard time stopping myself. No surface in my home is safe from me and my craft paint!

Have you stenciled anything lately?

P.S. This post is definitely not sponsored and the folks over at Martha Stewart have no clue who I am. I just get a bit enthusiastic about new crafting products!

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Corey and I have lived in this house for a little over a year and a half now, and we’ve made a ton of little updates along the way. We’re constantly tweaking and switching up things in our house, but up until this point we haven’t really done anything major.

Well…it’s time to fix that. I’ve teased several times over the last few weeks that Corey and I are in the process of getting new windows for our house, and we’re so incredibly excited about it. Our house has a ton of very large windows, and every last one of them is aluminum, single pane, not tempered (and therefore not at all up to code) and failing.

People always think I’m exaggerating when I talk about how bad our windows are, but let me put it this way: when you’re sitting on the couch on a cold night, you can feel the breeze from outside on the back of your neck. 

Seriously.

They’re THAT bad.

So, yeah. We’ve been wanting to fix ‘em for a while now but windows are expensive, y’all. Like, jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching expensive.

But, as the weather has started to warm up and we began to think of facing another Texas summer in what is basically a greenhouse (the entire back wall of our house is pretty much floor to ceiling windows, and the afternoon sun hits them perfectly), we knew we were going to have to suck it up and get it done.

First off, I’ll clarify that we aren’t actually updating the windows for the entire house yet. We decided to save some money and only do half of them now, and we’ll go back and do the rest later. We waffled back and forth on if we would split it up, but in the end we realized that if we only do half now we can go ahead and tackle the garage renovation now rather than waiting (eek!!), which made the decision pretty easy. So, throughout the post I’ll sprinkle in some photos of the windows we are replacing, so you can get an idea of what our plans are.

This was our first go-round with hiring someone to do something like this for our house – as you’ve probably noticed, we like to do most things ourselves. But this is a big job, and one that we totally don’t feel comfortable trying to tackle without professional help. So, we called in the pros. The windows aren’t installed yet (though we got confirmation that they were ordered at the end of last week, so they should be here in about two weeks!), but I thought today would be a good opportunity to chat about what we’re having done, and go through the process of hiring someone to do work on your house. It’s hugely intimidating if you’ve never done it before, and we learned a lot from our experience!

When it was time to call someone, we were pretty overwhelmed with options – do we go with a big box store like Lowe’s or Home Depot, or do we call in a smaller local company? Do we have a ton of people out to give us quotes or do we just say screw it and book the first people we meet? How do we know which company to use?

I started off by doing some online research. We have had a couple of quotes in the past (one from Lowe’s when we first moved in, and one from a local company about 6 months ago), so we had a general idea of what to expect in terms of cost. We knew we didn’t want to use the big box store, partially because their windows aren’t that awesome, but mostly because we like to go local whenever we can. We liked the company we had out near the end of last year, but we wanted some more quotes before making a final decision.

So, I turned to Yelp.

I’m a big fan of doing research before using a new company, and the best kind of research is looking up reviews. People are usually pretty brutally honest about their experiences with companies, so I wanted to know who was the best of the best. For example, we found out about a company that was going door to door in our neighborhood right around the time we were looking into getting some quotes – we figured we would have them out, but after checking out their Yelp page for less than five minutes I knew they weren’t the company for us. The reviews were awful, their customer service was pathetic, and their windows weren’t even that great.

My research helped me narrow down the options vastly – I ended up with three companies that had solid reviews and that I thought might be a good fit for us. We set up appointments with all three, and the process was officially in motion.

There are a lot of things that I learned in the process of having all of these people come out for quotes, but here are the top 5 things I think you should keep in mind when hiring out a project (I’m obviously talking specifically about windows here, but I think this applies to anything!):

1. Know what you want. This one sounds like a no-brainer, but when the first company came out Corey and I had put little to no thought into what types of windows we wanted throughout the house. We have some huge openings, and that means there are about a million different configurations we could use. We felt like we were in over our heads and really had no clue what we wanted for these windows, and I wish we would have been more informed from the beginning.

2. Be open minded. Yeah, I know – I just said you should know what you want going into it. BUT, that doesn’t mean that you should be completely set on something and refuse to take suggestions. We took every suggestion from every company very seriously, and got a lot of great advice and ideas on what to do for our windows. It was also a really great way to get a feeling for if the company was a good match for us – if they kept pushing something we weren’t all that interested in, we knew they probably wouldn’t be awesome to work with.

3. Know who is at your house. Two of the companies who we got a quote from were small enough that the owner of the company was the one to give us our quote. The third company was the only one who had an actual salesman out…and it showed. We connected with the owners so much better and got a definite “ick” feeling from the salesman. Knowing that the two companies were small enough and that the owner was dedicated enough that we got the head honcho himself was a great sign to us that they’d be the types of company we’d want to work with. It also helped us give the third guy a little bit of slack for being so slimy, because it’s hard for a salesman to compete with the owner of a company.

4. Ask about timelines. Going into this, we kind of just assumed that all companies would take around the same amount of time to complete the project. But in reality, we got wildly different quotes on how long it would probably take, ranging anywhere from two to eight weeks! Knowing how quick the turnaround would be made a huge impact on our decision.

5. Ask a ton of questions. This is another no-brainer tip, but I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to not be afraid to ask as many questions as you can possibly think of. At times, we felt like we were being a little annoying by asking so many questions and making sure to clarify their answers over and over, but in the end you are essentially interviewing these people – and the salary you are planning on paying them is very high. You want to make sure you’re going to be happy with their work and you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. So, grill away!

Once we had finished up and received quotes from all three companies, Corey and I sat down and weighed out the pros and cons of each one.

Company 1 was probably our favorite. We really liked the owner and how straightforward and honest he was. The set-up that he suggested for our windows was our favorite of all the companies, the turnaround time was quick, and the windows were the most energy efficient of all the ones we’d seen. The quote, however, was significantly higher than the other companies, and the owner pretty much flat out told us there was no way he could get as low as the other two companies had.

Company 2 had almost the exact same windows as Company 1, only slightly less energy efficient. The owner was a great guy and was definitely the most efficient when giving us our quote (he was in and out of our house in less than an hour!). The turnaround was the same as Company 1, and the window set-up we had planned was significantly more unique than any of the other suggestions we’d received, though we were a little nervous about it. The quote was the lowest of the three.

Company 3 was the only company who made their own windows. Their factory is only about an hour from where we live, which was pretty big for us. We loved how everything was locally-sourced and how we could have gone out to see the windows being made if we wanted to. We were not fans of the salesman who came out – he was friendly enough, but very pushy. He also bragged about things their company did, leading us to believe they were the only company who could do it, only to later find out it was a very common thing to do (such as doing window sashes that are lower than usual to improve your view and make the part that opens smaller). We really wanted to like their windows, but he was a major turn-off for us. Their quote was only slightly higher than Company 2, and their turnaround was significantly longer (which was understandable since they make their own windows).

In the end, it was a pretty easy decision for us to eliminate Company 3 – we’re VERY big on first impressions, and the salesman just left us with a bad feeling. We really wanted to go with Company 1, but their quote was way above what we had planned on spending and, since Company 2 was so incredibly similar (but with a much better price tag), we decided to go with them. I honestly think we would have been happy with any of the companies that we had out, but when you’re dealing with three really great companies you have to be picky sometimes.

And that, my friends, is almost 2,000 words on how we chose our window company. I know it’s not the most exciting post in the world, but I did quite a few searches for something like this when we were first getting started and I found nothing, so I figured I’d provide this for anyone who may be looking.

It is so scary to trust something as huge as this with people you’ve never met, but I have high hopes that our new windows are going to be amazing. I’m just excited to be able to turn on my oven in July without feeling like I’m going to melt.

What are your tips for hiring out a big home improvement project?

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Also known as one of the easiest projects ever in the history of this blog.

SERIOUSLY.

I’m as surprised as you are.

Remember this guy?

Well, I’m here today with a quick explanation of how we did it. This is one of those projects we had really been wanting to do for a while (we’ve had the stump sitting in our garage for close to a year!), but I was kind of intimidated by the sheer magnitude of it, so we put it off.

But we knew week four of Creating With the Stars was the perfect time to bust out the big guns, and we needed a side table for our reading room. So we decided to hop right in and do it.

The first step to a project like this is probably the most difficult part – find a stump.

We happened to have one left over from when my dad chopped down a tree for us last Father’s Day. Once you’ve got it, it needs to dry out. This is the part that may take a while…

For us, this part was already done – our stump had been sitting in the garage for about 10 months, so it was definitely dried. But, I’ve heard you should let it sit for several weeks or months, or basically as long as you can stand to make sure it’s good and dried out. You wouldn’t want any bugs crawling around, would you?

Since ours was already dry, we started off with peeling off the bark. All it took was a little bit of patience and a chisel.

Then it’s time to sand. Corey started off with 80-grit sandpaper to get the really rough parts off, then moved to 180-grit, and finished it off with 320-grit. This helped us get a super smooth finish and ensured that we won’t get any splinters. This thing is as smooth as any store-bought wood table, so the extra sanding was definitely worth it!

Once it was all sanded, all that was left to do was seal it. SERIOUSLY. We’re already almost done. If you want a color other than the natural wood, it would be very easy to stain as well, but we loved the light look and didn’t want to lose it. All we did was apply three coats of polycrylic with a foam brush (we sanded a little by hand between each coat to make sure we didn’t have any bubbles), and after letting it dry overnight we were DONE.

I’m telling you, this project is embarrassingly easy. And can you believe how gorgeous it is? I’m so in love with this table and I think it’s the perfect size. It’s great for holding a drink or a book while reading, and it doesn’t take up a lot of space in this incredibly tiny room.

And, um, yeah. That’s all there is to it!

Anyone else scared of a project that turned out to be incredibly simple?

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