Oh, how I have missed you.
I love summer, I really and truly do. But I also welcome
fall with wide-open sweater-covered arms. I realize it’s not really fall yet,
and today, it’s close to 100 degrees so my arms are bare and just the thought
of sweaters makes me sweat profusely. Summer this year has been something that
I will not be sad to say farewell to for more than one reason. It has been so
hot and humid since early June, and I am so ready for some days that I can walk
out of the house without my glasses fogging up. That alone will be awesome.
I haven’t written here for quite some time, I know. Work on the
homestead has slowed way down the past month or so, while work at work has sped up faster than I like. There
hasn’t been much time for me to write, or much to write about.
We accomplished so much in the couple of weeks before
Rachel’s party, and in the month and more since…well, we’ve accomplished not
very much at all. We wore ourselves out, and unlike the Energizer Bunny, we
haven’t had a whole lot of energy to keep going and going. Tony has gotten the
new baseboards on, and I painted the family room a few weekends ago, and that
is about it. All furniture and everything else is still in the garage or
basement, and I gotta say…I am more than ready to get my house put back
together. A few days ago, I was digging through a box in the basement looking
for something I needed, and there were Easter decorations in it; that is how
long my house has been torn apart. When we started all this back in April, we
thought we would be finished by the end of June, maybe mid-July. Then, after Tony
broke his arm, we pushed the finish line back until fall. Now, it is fall…and
my house is still in disarray, nothing is put away, I have piles of boxes in
the basement, dust- and cobweb-covered furniture sits in the garage. Tony
doesn’t want to bring anything back until he is finished with the baseboards. (They
are nailed up, but he still has some work to do caulking and sealing them).
While the new baseboards aren’t completely finished, they do
look really nice. When Tony said he wanted to throw our old ones away and put up
wider ones, I wasn’t sure I was going to like them,
b
ut I really do.
I also finally got the family room painted a few weeks ago.
I love it, too.
I pretty much love everything we have done so far! It’s like
a big ole hippy love fest around here. If I had the ability to write the word
love in that groovy, flowery 70s style, I would. Use your imagination and
envision that. Lauren did most of the painting in the family room…she helped me with the ceiling and did the rolling on the walls while I did the trim. I wasn’t too excited about giving up the sunny yellow that used to be there, but this new color, called Beach Grass, is a good compromise. The room is still light and bright, and I can’t wait for it all to be put back together because right now, it’s rather dull and empty.
I did something rather redneck-ish in that room, too. There
was/is a wallpaper boarder that I put up during the heyday of my wallpapering
phase not long after we moved in. So…almost 22 years. I’ve had lots of
experience scraping wallpaper off the past few years, so I knew what taking
that border down would be like. It would have taken me at least an entire day,
then it would have taken Tony a couple of days to repair the drywall that I
destroyed while removing it. So, I decided to paint over it.
Yes, I painted over wallpaper. It doesn’t look so great in a
few spots, but Tony’s next big project after he finishes all the work on the
baseboards is putting up crown molding in the family room. Since I knew it
would eventually be covered up, I felt okay with being lazy and painting over
it. There are only a few spots that look bad because the bottom edge of the
wallpaper had peeled up a bit. I thought about painting/trimming around it, but
I was/am so tired of painting walls that I just really did not care. Not even a
little bit. And it doesn’t look terrible. Most people won’t even notice.
Labor Day weekend, Tony was out of town and I took on my
scariest most ambitious DIY project yet.
Let me back up a moment though before I write about it.
We had a certain amount of funds set aside to do the things
we wanted to do to our house this summer. It wasn’t a lot, and it would have
cost us more to go on a fun beach vacation than we planned to spend on the
house. We are tightwad bargain hunter do-it-yourselfers, after all. I always
joke that I have Champagne taste on a cheap Sam’s Choice bottled water budget.
Not even a beer budget as the saying goes. I am tighter than that. I have
learned to be frugal over the years, and it has served me well. I like things
to be nice and just so, but I also take great satisfaction in finding a great
deal and in finding a way to make what I want happen while spending as little
money as possible. And while I want to spend cheap, I don’t want anything to look cheap. I’m all for DIY, but not if
it looks tacky or shoddy, or, well, cheap.
It’s a fine line I walk sometimes. While I don’t make wall
art out of toilet paper rolls or crafts from dryer lint, my thrifty DIY
projects don’t always turn out so well. But I won’t talk about those. I would
much rather talk about the thrifty DIY projects that turn out so freaking
awesome that I wish I could pat myself on the back.
So this summer, we planned to do some things as
inexpensively as possible, and I took on the task of painting my kitchen
cabinets. It was quite an undertaking, one I will hopefully never have to do,
ever again because it sucked.
It totally SUCKED.
But, they turned out great, and I am really happy
I did it. However, the next time I want new cabinets, I will take out a loan
and buy them. As God is my witness, I will never paint kitchen cabinets.
Not ever again.
I do love them though.
The project I took on Labor Day weekend was more challenging than painting the kitchen cabinets.
I painted the countertops.
Yes, I painted my kitchen countertops, and feast your eyes upon
them!
We had a certain amount of money in mind for how much we
would spend on our countertops when we remodeled the kitchen. And it wasn’t a
lot. We weren’t budgeting for granite or quartz…a nice laminate was all I was
wishing for. But, just as other plans we had for the summer fell apart to be
replaced by new plans, our plan for new countertops had to be tossed out when
in a 2 ½ week period, we had to spend over $3,000 on car repairs.
Unfortunately, we had our new countertops picked out, but we
hadn’t ordered and paid for them yet, so they got put on hold until…well, who
knows. Tony said maybe we can get them if we get an income tax return. L
I was disappointed. I have these beautiful freshly painted
white cabinets, new brushed silver hardware, a new kitchen floor…and our 22
year old ugly, stained white countertops.
Even if they wouldn’t
have been ugly and stained, I really did not like the look of white
countertops, white tile backsplash and white cabinets. It was really sterile
and downright blah and boring. Then one day, when I was wasting time on
Pinterest, I saw a tutorial for painting laminate counter tops. I was intrigued
and started reading more about it. It seemed like the perfect solution and an inexpensive
way to get rid of my ugly countertops.
But was I brave enough to do it? Painting cabinets white is
one thing; painting countertops to look like stone or granite or whatever else
is quite another thing. The photos and videos I saw showed beautiful work, but
I wasn’t sure I had the skills to pull it off. You can buy countertop
refinishing kits that are made by Rust oleum, but they seemed messy, and they
were expensive. More than I wanted to spend anyway. So I watched lots of You
Tube videos and scoured Pinterest for every tip I could find. Then, I went
shopping at Home Depot and Michaels. My two favorite places to shop. I know,
I’m weird…not that that is news or anything…
I ended up with all this:
I spent a grand total of $55. And most of those little
bottles of craft paint are going to be returned to Michaels since I bought way
more than I needed.
It may have been a scary project, but it was so easy. Much
easier than painting the cabinets. I started out by sanding and cleaning them
before covering them with the Rust oleum Countertop Coating. That was actually
the worst part of the whole project because that stuff stinks something fierce.
It could be smelled outside. Gross. And it was sticky and a bit hard to spread
evenly, but I didn’t care since I was covering it up anyway. 
Once the coating had dried overnight, I used scrunched up
Walmart bags and started layering on the colors.
Step 1 (charcoal gray) left me smacking my head and
wondering what the hell I was thinking when I decided to paint my countertops. 
I thought things would improve with step 2 and tan paint…but
they didn’t.
By this point, I was smacking my head, questioning my sanity
and continuing to wonder what the hell I was thinking when I decided to paint
my countertops. I really thought I had crossed a DIY line that should never
have been crossed. I envisioned Tony being so pissed off at me because I made
our ugly countertops look even uglier and that now we would have to buy new.
Then came the light gray layer, and I was finally able to start
to envisioning them looking fabulous. But, I still wasn’t convinced yet this
wasn’t going to be one of those Pinterest FAILS.
I added white, then a little more tan in a few places, I
dabbed on some more gray and white, and finally…
TA-DA! New countertops! They look great, but I still need to
put a few coats of that acrylic sealer. These photos are after 3 coats of
acrylic sealer, and they still need at least 2 more. 
Up next…
Last weekend, I started yet ANOTHER painting project.
Yeah, I know I keep saying how much I hate to paint…
I am painting my china cabinet and buffet with gray chalk
paint. When I started, it all looked like this. 
One of my favorite things about fall is making my house
cozy, and it is so far from cozy now. I need to fix that! And I am excited to
see if we reach our new goal for having our house back together…Christmas.
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