freshly painted kitchen

what a week. i hate hate hated this project, but all that hate was worth it when i saw the result. i feel like we have a new kitchen. and including foam rollers, primer and some cabinet-specific paint called 'advance' i only gave benjamin moore eighty of my hard-earned dollars. not bad!

our petite kitchen was once filled with cherry cabinets - beautiful, solid 'plain & fancy' brand cabinets in a simple, modern style - just not our fav color.

pinterest and houzz.com had me craving a glossy white kitchen, and we figured that could only make the room look larger. so i read all the blogs and took myself to benjamin moore for what is supposedly the best cabinet paint ever - advance. i chose a white called 'chantilly lace' - bright enough to really pop off the wall color ('big bend beige' by benjamin moore.)

a lot of other blogs outline the process in detail, my favorite being young house love. but what surprised me was the 16 hour dry time between coats with this paint. it turns out that 16 hours is a really awkward amount of time, because it's hard to paint more than one coat per day without totally disrupting one's sleep schedule. but i'm hoping that all that extra drying time is just the price i paid for a rock-hard enamel surface that will stand the test of time....

here's the during....

the chaos of cabinet painting

progress

and here's the AFTER!

cabinets 'chantilly lace' by benjamin moore - view from dark gray mudroom

the white cabinets are so much more welcoming than the dark cherry wood - now the kitchen pulls you in from the darker rooms on either side. and i love the ceiling paint - same color as in the screen porch, 'hazel' by sherwin williams.

glossy white cabinets - check.

white cabinets looking spiffy from main room in 'sticks & stones' by sherwin williams

view into mudroom with chartreuse door. bright bright bright!

love how the white cabinetry sets off the granite. we didn't love it before, favoring white countertops as we do...now it looks pretty snazzy!

and since i was excited about phil's new kitchen (b/c even though i'm protective of the paint through its curing period, it is truly his kitchen) i went to home goods for an assortment of cheap drawer organizers and reorganized EVERYTHING...por ejemplo:

utensil drawer - no more mish mash

baking drawer

tupperware - neat and tidy, lids separate

and then that freshly painted bathroom got some love too...i tend to make a mess of my toiletries every morning so i'm hoping that the home goods organizers will be cute enough to make me slow down and put things in their places.

how long do you think this will last? fresh bathroom organization  - tomorrow's gonna be a good day

boom. organized.

next post will either concern the installment of 3 54-gallon rain barrels or the guest room, which is getting fresh wall paint (got a half gallon of  'big bend beige' still to burn after painting the kitchen and master bath) and the dresser is almost done becoming yellow - 'arles' by annie sloan....but for now, delicious scents are wafting out of that beautiful kitchen.  time to see what phil's up to.

bouquets this week

chartreuse!

i have a crush on a color. that color is chartreuse.

the color is named after the yellow-green french liquor,

but i see it everywhere in my garden - it's often the color of new growth in spring.

chartreuse foliage left to right from top:
gold lace juniper, euonymus, euphorbia, fir tree (?),  chardonnay pearls
deutzia, coral bells snow angel, red twig dogwood, abelia bronze anniversary

it also happens to go with a surprising variety of other colors, and it was the answer to a tough problem in our new screen porch. what would pop with pine, white, haint blue, dark gray, medium gray and coral, the colors both inside and around the porch? i tried a few colors and finally got up the nerve to paint both doors to the screen porch in sherwin williams chartreuse.

doors are sherwin williams chartreuse

chartreuse in 'urbane bronze' mudroom

sherwin williams 'chartreuse' against 'sticks and stones' walls 

how can such a bright color be so calming? the sherwin williams shade is somehow too mellow to be neon. the feel is modern, but the color is in the company's historic collection. it's perfection in a color.

master bath makeover

here was our tiny master bath when we bought the house:

and here it is today:

master bath - view from bedroom

master bath, looking through hall bath (that's right, they're connected...)

new floor to ceiling toile shower curtain

shower curtain goes all the way up to the ceiling, and i painted the ceiling the same color as the walls to add to the height of the tiny room

cabinets painted annie sloan chalk paint 'old white', walls are 'big bend beige' by benjamin moore

close up of my shower curtain made out of spray-painted metal conduit and plumbing straps to connect it to the ceiling...cost about $10! couldn't find a ceiling mounted rod and didn't want to bother drilling through the tile. problem solved!

so pretty!

raising the shower curtain really opens up the room!

i am so glad i raised that shower curtain! the hard part was finding an extra long curtain and liner. so i gave up and made one just the right size and pattern for our little bathroom. just hope the pretty toile decorator fabric holds up to daily use without needing frequent cleaning...

to celebrate, phil invented a new drink.

new drink by phil called the toile - orange bitters, angostura bitters, dry and sweet vermouths and cognac. mmmmmm!

happy may day!

woodland garden

i thought i could wait til the fall to start on the 'other' side yard - yeah right! george motivated me to get started when it took me 20 paper towels and a hose-off to get his feet clean the other morning.

the other side yard - when we bought the house

basically, i just decided to hurry up what nature is doing and let the whole area naturalize. the grass still grows in the center where there is less shade, but moss, violets and periwinkle from the neighbor's yard are slowly filling in along the fence and between the dogwood and hydrangeas.  unfortunately these plants are too low-growing to slow george and he is constantly grinding them into the mud, and enlarging the muddy area in the corner.

dogwood in side yard - before 

the goal - a clean walkway to from the backyard to the front, with lush eye candy on either side that needs next to no help surviving (this is the furthest point from the water spigot...) and is dense/tall enough that george will prefer to stay on the grass most of the time.

the answer - an assortment of miracle plants! seriously, they sound too good to be true.

1. lenten roses - to fill in under the dogwood with evergreen foliage and flowers in late winter/early spring

hellebores (lenten rose)

2. foamflower - a native forest groundcover, with evergreen foliage and spring flowers

3. white wood aster - a vigorous perennial spreader with tiny white blooms in early fall

white wood aster 

4. bigroot cranesbill (geranium macrorrhizum) - this gorgeous and fragrant evergreen perennial groundcover gets about a foot high and is highly adaptable, which hopefully means it will thrive on my shady clay hill. it should help keep out unwanted weeds with its dense foliage and roots that creep along the surface and navigate tree roots and poor soil with ease.

bigroot geranium

5. false blue indigo - for the sunny side of the clearing i planted this drought-tolerant plant that should give some nice cut flowers in summer.

false blue indigo

6. kerria japonica - japanese rose is my only hope thus far for our muddiest corner. its a loose rambling thing that will put out suckers if it likes my clay mud but i wouldn't mind if it spreads quite a bit. this is a woodland garden afterall! i love the yellow flowers and hope they bloom all summer long. the branches stay green in the winter.

kerria japonica in back corner, with geum avens, foamflower and coral bells 'green spice' in foreground 

here's the result, complete with george-deterring fences and a pine bark path around the dogwood so i can water the lenten roses without getting muddy....

mint was growing wild around the peonies -  sprayed round up, smothered with paper bags and topped with pine bark mulch

 after a long day, i made a few little bouquets from my gardens and sat down in the screen porch with a mint julep. heaven!

top left: columbine, foamflower, bleeding hearts, iceland poppies, geum avens, euphorbia; top right: pansies and candytuft; bottom left: dianthus, euphorbia, candytuft, sage; bottom right: lilies and euphorbia

loving my 'tree for all seasons' coasters from etsy