Tara’s Takes
Ihave a serious question: Where does the term “weekend project” come from? I have lots of projects around my house. After going room to room and making a list of all the “projects” I’d like to have done and dreaming and thinking about them, I finally bit the bullet and decided to tackle one. OK, it was more of a “we” project than an “I” project because if it wasn’t for Ben and Natalie’s help, this project would have taken me months instead of days.
While my kitchen is functioning, there were just aspects I hated and some things that just didn’t work for us. Some aspects I could change and some were out of my budget. My kitchen has red countertops and light blue linoleum with white lines that is supposed to make it look like tile. Inside those white lines I have the little red swirls. Combined with the cabinets, I just need to add apples and teddy bear decor to have the perfect 1980s kitchen. However, countertops and flooring are out of my budget so we decided to tackle what we could to make the kitchen function better for us.
First and foremost was storage. We had open shelves for our pantry. With dogs in the house, this just doesn’t work. Most of the time they are great with it. However, recently, they have discovered that if they are left in the house due to rain or cold temps and get a little hungry, the pantry is right there for them to retrieve a snack.
Of course, when they help themselves to some crackers or chips, they have to devour the entire bag and leave the trash all over the house. So to eliminate the temptation and to give it a more clean look, we added a hutch cabinet. This meant some assembly required for Ben. After a few hours one evening and some more on Saturday, I am happy to report we have a beautiful cabinet the dogs cannot get into.
Secondly, I have teenagers. We make trash and we make recycling. We had one trash can. The trash went into it and the recycling piled in a spot on the floor until mom complained and someone took it out. Now, I know I could have a recycling can in the garage and tell myself and my kids to bring the recycling there and the garbage to its spot each time. But I am also realistic, and my focus was making the kitchen more functioning for our family.
So we exchanged out our single tilt out trash cabinet for a double, one side for trash, the other for recycling. This meant more assembly for Ben.
I helped a little more with this project, but I’m pretty sure Ben is done with the some assembly projects for his mom for a while.
The other major project was our cabinets. I like the look of wood and have a hard time painting wood if it’s in good shape, so that wasn’t an option for our cabinets. However, our cabinets were hardwarefree. Since they didn’t have hardware, they very much showed where you always grabbed the cabinets and drawers to open them.
To tackle this project, the first thing we did was give all the doors and drawers a really good scrubbing. Natalie can tell you that this was “disgusting.” After scrubbing them, we (really, Ben did this, too) installed pulls on the cabinets and drawers. Since our new kitchen hutch and trash cabinets were black, we chose black pulls to bring the cohesive look throughout. He did a really good job and everything was great until we got to the final drawer pull and realized the handles stuck out enough that our corner drawers didn’t open because they hit the handles by 1/8”.
In addition to all this work, we put a different cabinet that was meant for the wall and needed to be moved. We also painted and added wallpaper (which I discovered I hate to hang) to an accent wall. After many hours or work, a few swear words by mom and blood (both mom and Ben), sweat (both of us) and tears (only mom), we “finished.”
Here lies my dilemma for the term weekend project. We worked hard all weekend. While the pantry food is put away, the rest of the kitchen is still in the living and dining room. The ceiling that needs to be fixed due to a leak hasn’t been touched.
The counters in the kitchen are still covered with debris despite me wiping them down during the project. I still have shelves to install, decor to put up, and I need to deal with that little drawer issue as I can’t fully open my silverware drawer right now.
I haven’t had time to tackle any of this in the evenings this week as we’ve been busy with coverage, but I will. And by the time everything is done, this will probably be a month project and not a weekend project.
Then I’ll move on to something else on my list. I just better make sure it doesn’t include some assembly required for Ben!
