Estate Sale Treasures

Last weekend I happened to drive by an estate sale, so I stopped in.  The house was a small cape cod style, and probably a little bit bigger than our own ranch house, but it was PACKED to the brim with antiques and collectibles   The person managing the estate sale said that the former owners had had intentions of opening up an antique store, but ultimately never did.  It was so packed you barely had room to walk! 

Anyway, I had to seriously restrain myself because there were SO many pretty things.  This is what I walked out with:

1. Three lovely vintage brass necklaces ($3 apiece)--see the three necklaces on the left.  

On the day that I went to the estate sale I was actually wearing a brass necklace that I had thrifted back in high school with my best friend (the one on the right).  It's got a lovely patina to it and it goes with so many things, so I was happy to find more.

Two of the necklaces I got are quite short--they are almost like chokers and sit at the very base of your neck, so I'm going to see if I can find some matching brass chain to lengthen them just a couple inches.  

2. Two old measuring cups (Pyrex and Fire King) for $1 (small) and $1.50 (large).  

In my opinion, one can never have too many measuring cups!  I can never find mine when I need them, so I was happy to get these for a steal (new ones will run you at least $5 - 8).

3. Nine vintage drinking glasses for $0.50 apiece (or $4.50 total).   And yes, only 7 are shown in the picture--I'd shelved and others and couldn't reach them without a chair!  

The estate sale had a LOT of glassware and porcelain, but it wasn't necessarily functional (ie: display-only ornate pitchers/vases/bowls that would not be able to stand up to any kind of normal kitchen abuse).  However, I did manage to find these cute glasses hidden away in a back corner that I thought would make decent drinking glasses.  As I was walking out with them, a guy stopped me and told me to look up "Dorothy Thorpe" when I got home, and sure enough, the glasses are a mirror image for the style that was popular back in the 1960's (or today's TV show Mad Men).

I was a little bummed out when some of the metallic color started to come off when I washed them, so maybe they aren't originals, but they are super cute to look at and luckily I didn't pay much for them anyway.  

4. This tangled capiz shell wall hanging for $4. 

This was actually so tangled that I just clipped all the shells off--I'll restring them later or use them in another project.  Possibly for a light fixture over the kitchen sink?  Overall, I consider this to be a pretty good deal because I seriously doubt that I'd be able to buy ~40 large shells for $4 anywhere else.

All-in-all, it was $20 spent, but I was so thrilled to come across some awesome things.  PS: If you haven't checked out my tips for thrifting and garage sale-ing, click here.  Then go out and find some of your own treasures!  

Kitchen Update: How to Convert Flat Doors into Shaker-style Doors

Hey all!  So one of the things that I mentioned when I first brought up my kitchen renovation was converting my flat panel kitchen cabinet doors into shaker-style doors.  Well, I finally started working on it last weekend, so I figured I'd show you how things are looking so far!

First, while I was busy painting the insides of cabinets, I had the husband sand down all of the kitchen cabinet doors and fill in any holes from hardware/hinges etc.  As always, he was thrilled to be helping...you can tell by the ecstatic look that he has on his face ;) 

Sanding the cabinet shells themselves was quite the handful, so I was thankful not to have to sand the doors as well!  

After a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally selected a thin plywood called Apple Ply for the shaker-style trim.  The stuff that I used was 1/4" thick and 2.5" wide because that's what looked best on my doors.  I say that because they also make trim that's thicker and wider and/or narrower.  If you can't find it in your hardware store right away that's because it's not shelved with the rest of the traditional wood molding--it's in with the smaller pieces of wood, like the ones you'd use for hobbies/models etc.

As a side note, Lowes also had similarly-sized pieces of solid poplar wood trim that I could have used (they were also slightly cheaper).  But the poplar didn't seem as sturdy--it looked like it would dent easily if it got hit with something because you could nick it with your fingernail.  

Instead of jumping straight to attaching trim to cabinets, I chose to prime everything first.  If there is one thing that I learned from painting the insides of the kitchen cabinets, it's that you should use a roller on everything that you possibly can!  If I put the trim on the doors first, I'd have to use a brush on the cracks and crevices for priming, and I wanted to avoid some of that, if possible.  

  

Once everything was primed, I cut my trim to size.  It just so happens that the day that I did this, Upstate NY decided that April was going to revert back to a winter month, and we had snow flurries throughout the afternoon.  And of course, in an effort to keep the house "clean" I had my miter saw out on the back deck...

After the trim was cut to size, I put some liquid nails wood glue on the back of the trim...

...and secured it down with some nails using my little air compressor and nail gun.  My parents got me a small Campbell Hausfield air compressor and nail gun combo kit for Christmas--it's got a 2 gallon tank that holds enough compressed air for what I do, and it's lightweight so I can carry it around with me wherever I need it.  I used it for the first time on my bathroom closet makeover, and it was wonderful!

So, because I'm obviously not a wood-worker, the joints between the wood pieces were not perfect.  I filled in cracks/nail holes with wood putty and then got busy sanding stuff smooth.  Wood putty is a LOT harder than joint compound, which means that it is also harder to sand and get super smooth.  Once I sanded the wood putty as well as I could, I followed it up with a layer of joint compound to get things really smooth.

The catch-22 there is that joint compound also sucks up paint like it's going out of style, so I also had to re-prime over the spots where I had filled in cracks/nail holes so that it wasn't glaringly obvious when I finally used my really nice expensive paint.  Hmm...have I mentioned I'm tired of painting yet?

About half of the doors are completely done, while the other half are a work in progress.  Can you say "I can't wait to be able to hide all my crap behind kitchen doors again?!"  Umm yeah, I can't WAIT.  Stay tuned!  

3 things I'm in love with right now...

I'm taking a quick break from the kitchen updates--I'll be back later this week with some progress pictures because we got a LOT done this past weekend (yay!).

For right now I figured that I'd show you some things that I'm totally smitten with right now.  So much in fact that it seems kinda selfish to keep them to myself...

1.  This Color Reveal Lip Balm from Sephora.  I've been on the hunt for the perfect lip balm for about 4 years now--why is it so hard to find something that hydrates and gives you a natural-looking color?  Fortunately, I think that I've finally found it!  This lip balm is supposed to react with your body's pH to create a custom lip color.  Now, I'm no chemist so I'm not sure if that's what actually happens, but I CAN tell you that it looks 100% natural on me and I am hooked.  Its color seems to stick around for a while too, so I don't feel the need to reapply every 5 min.  

Priced at $12, I thought that it was kind of pricey for a lip balm.  However, since a lot of lip products in the store cost me about $5-8 anyway, spending the few extra $$ is worth it for me because I like it so much better than anything else I've tried.  Plus if you go into Sephora you can try it before you buy it!  

2. The seller Luxe Deluxe on Etsy.  Is it socially acceptable to want a different engagement ring for each day of the week?  Because that's what I'm leaning towards after I came across this vendor on Etsy who sells the most gorgeous and affordable collection of vintage rings that I've ever seen (she also sells some new vintage-styled jewelry pieces too!).  This is just a sample of the rings that she has in her vintage collection that changes on a weekly basis--be prepared to fall in love! 

3. The user Modernhaus on Instagram.  Instagram is a form of social media where you can apply nifty-looking filters to pictures that you take with your phone.  I don't know the user Modernhaus personally, but I love her for several reasons: 1) She thrifts the BEST things ever,  2) She's got a great sense of style, and 3) Her comments and captions on her pictures are flippin' hilarious.  In addition to Instagram she also has a blog (although she doesn't post to it as frequently), and she also sells her second-hand finds on Ebay.  If you're in the market for some seriously gorgeous mid century furniture, check out her stuff.  

Kitchen Update: Gorgeous Lined Kitchen Cabinets

This past weekend I started putting things back in the upper kitchen cabinets!  Can I get a "hallelujah"?!  Such a relief to reach up and grab a bowl instead of hunting around the house...

Pssst...don't you love all of those glasses?!  They're all thrifted!  I found the gold striped ones a couple of weekends ago for $0.70 apiece.  

Speaking of upper cabinets--notice anything different?  I lined the backs of the cabinets with pretty printed fabric!  Obviously the cabinet doors aren't up yet, but the idea is that once you open the cabinet door it will be like a mini *surprise*  Cause I mean, who doesn't like surprises?  Especially ones this pretty...

I hunted around for the perfect fabric for quite a while, and finally hit the jackpot with a clearenced shower curtain at--you guessed it--Target.  To line the back of the cabinets, I wrapped the fabric around cardboard forms, so if I ever get the urge to change it up in the future, all I'll have to do is re-wrap the cardboard pieces and pop them back in.  

Although I probably could have scrounged up cardboard from various boxes etc, I chose to buy tri-fold presentation boards at Joann Fabrics (I used coupons so three of them cost me about $8). I really wanted to use foam board, but it was going to end up costing me a lot more, so I changed my plans.

The lower part of the cabinet that will hold the microwave got fabric that was just a little bit more neutral since it will be visible all the time. It's a nice yellow that meshes well and has a subtle silver printed design.  From a distance the silver looks grey, but I really like it because it matches perfectly.  

The process was pretty simple: measure the cabinet wall, cut cardboard to fit, and wrap the cardboard with fabric.  I used duct tape to secure the fabric around the cardboard.  I considered using my hot glue gun, but thought that the glue might wreak havoc on the cardboard if I tried to remove it later on.  Last but not least, I used little sticky squares for posters to keep the cardboard pieces stuck to cabinet walls!

I'm doing my best to purge all of the bowls, plates, and cups as I put them back in.  I still have more stored away in boxes that need to be put back, but this is a start!

Kitchen Update: Cheerio yellow

Hey all!  I am happy to report that 95% of the cabinet insides are painted, which means that I'll be able to start storing stuff back in the kitchen again!  Two coats of primer and 3 coats of final paint was a LOT of work.  When I first started, I remember thinking that I'd have it all done in a week or so.  Ha, yeah right!  We're going onto week #3 of painting, which just goes to show that things always take longer than you think...you'd think that I would know that by now, right?

I made things easy on myself and followed the painting procedure that Young House Love developed when they painted their kitchen.  First I primed everything using Zinsser's Smart Prime, and then applied three final coats of paint--I used Benjamin Moore's Advanced paint in a satin finish.  I had them custom tint it to match the trim in the rest of my house (Behr's "popped corn").  The only thing that I did differently during the process was that I skipped the inital prep of liquid sand paper because if you remember correctly, I sanded my cabinets down to within an inch of their lives using my small sander because they were pretty dirty and needed some wood-filler lovin'.  I am also going the extra mile and painting the insides of the cabinets white instead of leaving them in their raw wood state (they were nasty nasty dirty).  

The biggest pain in the butt out of the whole process were the inside corners of the cabinets.  I rolled as much as I could with my mini roller, but of course round rollers don't fit nicely into corners so I had to use a brush to paint those instead.  Well, the brush doesn't cover nearly as well as the roller, so I was left with very obvious inside paint lines around the corner areas.  So the corners got a 4th coat of paint, and I think that I made need to go in and touch up certain areas a 5th time.  I found that a cheap little foam brush actually worked pretty well in terms of coverage (but I only figured this out at the end!).  

Anyway, how 'bout those bottom cabinets, eh?  BRIGHT.  Believe it or not, when I applied the first layer of yellow, they looked positively fluorescent--like I'd colored them in with the brightest highlighter I could find.  I think that it was because of the white primer underneath, but it really freaked me out at first!  

The color mellowed out a bit with a second coat of yellow, but they are still super bright.  Almost as bright as...my Cheerio box!   

The yellow has been up for about a week now, and although I kindaaa like it, I'm not totally in LOVE with it, which means that it's gotta go.  I'm in the process of trying to find a slightly more-mellowed out yellow so that I can repaint them (maybe this weekend?).

Also up next is painting the kitchen cabinet doors and the molding that will convert them from flat panels into shaker-style doors.  The husband was kind enough to sand all of them down for me this past weekend (with a lot of prodding).  I've also got a fun little project planned for the inside of the upper cabinets, so with a little luck, I will get that done this weekend too!  

Now We're Cookin' (again)

Hey all!  I'm slowwwly making progress on the cabinet painting.  Very slowly--almost painfully so.  I will be SO happy when I can finally stash things away again!  Rooting around cardboard boxes to find things is getting old...

Husband: "Where did you put the--?"
Me: "For the last time, it's in one of the 10 cardboard boxes of kitchen stuff sitting in the living room!!"
Husband: "If we had less stuff this wouldn't happen.  There would just be 1 box and it would be in there."

*rolls eyes*

I hit a small bump in the road last weekend when I was working on the upper kitchen cabinets.  In a lapse of clear judgement I leaned on the top of my like-new Jenn Air slide-in oven when--<<crack!>>--yup, you guessed it!  I cracked the top of that glass cooktop like it was a crispy crunchy potato chip (side note: mmm...potato chips!).  

Cue Sara falling to her knees in the middle of the kitchen cursing out the DIY Gods..."Whyyy did you let me do that?!"

I pulled out the pieces of glass and thankfully all of the cooktop elements were OK, which meant that only the glass piece itself would need to be replaced.  In a fit of panic I called a local appliance store...for my oven, they quoted me $400 for a new glass top, plus another $100-200 for installation.  Ahhhh...since I only paid $400 for the oven to begin with, I was sooo bummed out!

Then I started searching online.  I could have gotten a non-brand replacement part at Sears (online) for $265.  But then I found a legit Jenn Air replacement glass top at Repair Clinic for $330, so that's what I went with.  Even though it was an oversized part (the box it came in looked like it could fit a big screen TV!), shipping was only $9.  Delivery was also super fast--I ordered it on a Saturday afternoon, it shipped on a Monday, and was here by Wednesday.  Which was nice because we were having a LOT of microwaveable soup in the mean time...I wasn't about to tempt fate by using the oven part of the stove with the top glass all cracked, even though it probably would have been OK.

The husband and I tag-teamed the switch one night after work.  It only took about 1/2 an hour which was nice.   The elements for the cooktop were attached/suspended under the old cooktop so we had to swap those over and then remember where all of the screws went to hook everything back up.

There are diagrams online to show you where everything goes (thankfully), so I think that as long as you can follow a picture and use a screw driver, you could probably replace your cook top too (if you should ever be so unlucky as to crack yours).

Before I had to replace the top, the oven looked pretty darn new.  But now it looks so brand spankin' new that it was hard to get a good picture (so shiny and reflective!).  Of course, I'm not sure I would have have voluntarily paid $330 to get it like that to begin with, but I'm trying to look on the bright side ;)

Some Upper Cabinet Action

Today I thought that I'd show you some progress that we made on the cabinets around the stove area!  If you recall (here), there used to be a wall oven with another tall narrow cabinet to the right of where the slide-in stove is right now.  It was hard for me to reach the top shelves above the oven and the narrow cabinet was so dirty and grungy that we only used it for recycling.  It was such a waste of space in an already tiny little kitchen.

Taking all of that stuff out left us with quite a bit of empty wall space.  Once we installed the slide-in oven, all I had to do was pick up an off-the-shelf 12" base cabinet from Lowes and install it to the right side of the oven (I'll be retrofitting the doors/drawer to look like the other doors in the kitchen later on). That took care of the base cabinets.  

The upper cabinets weren't so easy.  First, I discovered that our existing upper cabinets are 36" tall and that most kitchens have only 30" tall upper cabinets.  As a result, I couldn't just walk into Lowes and buy a 36" upper cabinet because those are "custom" units and you have to order a minimum of 5 of them at a time.  Gahhhh! As a result, I had to get a little creative with what I had.  This is what we ended up doing...

The upper cabinet to the left of the stove (originally 30" tall due to the old hood vent that was installed below it) was extended down about 6" to become the microwave cabinet.  I used trim pieces from the old cabinets we pulled out to extend the frame down and then lined the inside of the cabinet with a piece of plywood to keep the seams together and ensure that it would actually support a microwave.  Cause no one wants their microwave falling down randomly...why is it that those things always seem to happen in the middle of the night?

This freed up a lot of counter space although I'm still getting used to having the microwave up there!  I will eventually trim the old cabinet doors down to fit on just the top half of the cabinet above the microwave.

The cabinet above the stove was one that I bought at Lowes (a 30" tall cabinet).  Because the oven that I bought is a down-draft vented stove (see more on that here), I didn't really need to put in an overhead hood vent plus it saves me from having to buy an overhead vent (yay! more money for other stuff!).  Even though I could have made another 36" cabinet to go over the stove, I thought that might close off the space and make things seem cramped.  The 30" cabinet works perfectly there because you don't have to worry about the cabinet hovering over your pots and pans as you cook.  I added some plywood pieces at the top part of the cabinet to match the lines of the other cabinets already in the kitchen, and filled in the joints with wood putty until everything was smooth.  

The husband made me a 12" wide wall cabinet for the empty wall spot to the right of the stove since we didn't have the option of buying a 36" tall unit.  Again, he used leftover pieces from the cabinets that we had already pulled out of the kitchen.  I'll eventually make a door for it using one of the leftover door pieces that we have stored away right now.  But for right now, everything is out in the open.

As you can see, I also starting priming everything this past weekend!  I wish that I were one of those people who enjoyed painting...but it's just so time consuming and messy.  I actually had a perfect stranger ask me what I was working on today because he could see all of the leftover paint on my hands and arms...and in my hair!  Oops...

So that's what's going on here.  I hope to start painting with my final paint choices later this week!