I love these brown toile-ish towels, I found them in a little antique store in Cooperstown for $6.00, there is a little price tag inside each one that reads $35.00 a piece!
I love the old rolling pins in the basket, my son Dayton just made the beautiful cutting board in shop class, it is too pretty to use!
Loving my $7.00 ice bucket for my utensils, like I said, 2 drawers calls for lots of unique storage solutions!
The top picture is labeled "The Thorn and it has a date on the back from the 1800's. It hung in my grandparents home for as long as I can remember, I used to look at it all of the time, I like how it looks in the kitchen. The bottom photo was taken at a local school in the 30's.So sorry I have been a bad blogger lately! Life has been crazy. Since my dad passed away on Jan. 14th I have just not felt like "me". I thought it was "normal" but since have gone to several doctor appts, had test done on my heart and blood and found that I am severely anemic, so I am slowly getting my energy back, I could hardly climb the stairs and my heart would just beat out of my chest. So I am working on getting that fixed and a few more minor adjustments. I am praying that I will be better than ever! That tied in with the kids spring sports and activities help to explain why my life has been a bit crazy.
So that explains why it has taken me a month to get back to blogging. Anyhow, I am trying very hard to find pictures of before the re-do but they are somewhere in the many boxes of photos I have around the house. I will find them someday, actually I don't think I have any where they show how bad the kitchen was, I didn't want pictures of that! It was just tired, we have lived here for 8 1/2 years and we bought new but the builder picked everything out, cheaply I might add. We have worked hard through the years to update and make the house more "us". Cheaply I might add again! You should know that about me by now!
So the main portion of our little budget went into flooring, it was awful and now I love my laminate wood floors. They do look very pretty. I would love to gut the whole kitchen and I really didn't want to put tons of money into the floors in case we won the lottery and in a few years decided to do our dream kitchen. It is very small and I have 2 drawers in my whole kitchen, so storage is always a challenge. I also kept our white appliances because well, if they ain't broke don't get rid of them. I would love stainless someday. My handy man of a hubby hung some beadboard for me on the walls and under the bar area, we also put some up as a backsplash, my cottagey look started to really come together at that point. The main difference was in the cabinets, we painted the old oak cabinets white and kept my original knobs. We are going to put crown molding up on the top when we get a chance. We painted the walls a nice taupey color. It is Wicker by Eddie Bauer at Lowes. I had a color picked out first and Mark put one stroke on the wall and I told him to wait, it looked like I had dumped my foundation bottle out and put it on the walls. Yuk! Love the Wicker now! I also am on the lookout for a beat up but sturdy old table for the nook instead of my set that is there now. It is fine for now but it won't be long before one of us breaks a chair! I did simple mistreatments on the bay window, I just cut the fabric, didn't stitch an inch! I attached them with drapery clips and hung them from the new rod. I added lots of vintage touches like a frozen food sign above the stove, a cake and flour canister, and a wooden corned beef box from mom's garage filled with hydranges. I also put a pretty berry garland at the top of the window. I added some new rugs and voila! A cottagey kitchen that I can be proud of! I hope you enjoyed this little tour, sorry it took so long. It was a labor of love and was a wonderful winter project to keep my mind off of things. Bless my hubby's heart for doing all of the work, he is the best!
