Morning tea

This is my morning. Tea is first on the agenda, and waking up. I am not a morning person. I need hot tea to unclog my head & my mind. Usually 2  green Constant Comment teabags and 1 Red Raspberry Leaf.  I have a sitting area in my bedroom where I come to check my email, get my day lined up.

My little table started life as someones funky, homemade padded footstool, that I then made a pull on

 slipcover  for it.

When I rearranged my bedroom last month, instead of being used as a side table, I pulled it in front of my loveseat. But I was afraid that it would end up with teen agers' feet on it, since the tv is right across from it. So I decided to make sure everyone knew it's function.

And this was where I first started picking up aluminum trays. I saw this one in an antique store, for not much $, and realized it would suit my purpose...

Then I just collected my items and set them up. A tiny milk glass sugar & creamer, though since I started a low carb diet I haven't used them. Sometimes one of the kids will join me, and they do use the sugar & creamer. A pretty grape embossed vase serves as a spooner. A little milk glass berry dish is my *waste* bowl. A Buchan pottery Thistle teapot is just big enough to hold 3-4 cups of tea, and sits on a  milk glass plate I got at a thrift store. The tiny handle-less mug is for my 4 year old, 6 of 6. He likes to have tea with me.

Usually I will also have tea in either the late afternoon, or after 8 pm. Afternoon teas are usually Stash's Moroccan Mint, and evening tea is Good Earth's Green Jasmine tea. One of these days I am going to branch out into loose teas. But I haven't quite got the energy to adding another step to my morning routine. Maybe I'll start loose teas for afternoon tea.

My private oasis, until someone starts calling for me anyway.

Lilac Time

It's been really cold & windy here for the first few days of May, but the lilacs are still blooming.

I finally found that banging the bottom of the stems with a hammer to crush them was the trick to getting the flowers to last more than a day.

These are the pale lilacs, the white and darker purple weren't open yet.

Kitchen.. part 3...

I hadn't been thrift shopping or antiquing in at least 3 years when I decided to pop into an antique store next to the yoga studio I go to, after class. It was right about the time I started reimagining the kitchen, just prior to painting.

I kept seeing hand hammered and stamped aluminum trays. I liked a lot of the designs I saw, mostly floral or nature scenes of some sort. But couldn't imagine what I would use them for or where to put them.



While washing the kitchen with TSP, to get it ready to paint, I was scrubbing away at the back splash area under the cabinets, when the idea hit me. Those aluminum trays would make a great back splash! And I could take them down, pop them into the dishwasher and boom! Clean back splash!

The great thing about these trays are that they are easy to find and very affordable. $5 to $15 each. Once I started looking, I had a hard time not buying more than I needed (pack rat alert!).








My adult daughters and I wrangled a bit about placement. I really should listen to my oldest daughter, she is a talented artist, but I ended up wanting MORE and didn't follow her "less is more" sensibilities.


But it is my kitchen, so for now, it stays. You can see the back splash in Kitchen post #2 as well. Please forgive my poor design layout on the blog page, I am still new at this.

Kitchen part 2

So here is how the kitchen came out, the cabinet side of it anyway. The cabinets are the *Autumn Clematis* color. I have room above the cabinets to display some milk glass, jadite, baskets, a few of my teapots... there's a story to tell, but I digress...

Try not to notice the horrendous yellow laminate countertops. I think I might like to try painting them, but, not yet. I barely could keep my grandmother & 4 yr old son out of the kitchen for a week to paint the cabinets!

Kitchen...

After getting into our new house, fixing & painting what absolutely had to, there was no spare cash left for a new kitchen. So we painted the kitchen cabinets. Only we didn't start with nice wood cabinets, something solid, but serviceable. No, we have crapola cabinets. Trim pieces barely screwed on, face frames separating, not even real wood doors.

My attempt at crackle finishing them failed, so I ended up doing a light sponge technique on them. And then a friend painted a little bit of ivy vines across some of the upper cabinets. Only my *helpers* didn't thoroughly wash the cabinets around the stove, and some of the primer + paint peeled in a few places. A household with 6 active kids means the cabinets saw a lot of abuse. Plus at one point my mother lived with us, wheelchairs scrape paint off of cabinets.

I had hoped that perhaps this would be the year of the new cabinets, but it didn't look like that was going to happen. I couldn't bear the look of the old cabinets against the wall paint color, so painting them was on the agenda.

2 coats of BIN primer. And then 2 full coats & 1 light finish coat of True Value's Cabinet, trim & Door paint. I painted them in the same color as the rest of the doors & interior trim. "Autumn Clematis" from Martha Stewarts's original KMart paint line. I have 3 swatch cards I have kept for 10 years and fortunately they have color matched well every time I've used them.

Paint

We have been in our house for nearly 12 years. It was the first house we bought, after spending several years as a military family moving around the world. It was definitely a cosmetic fixer-upper. Dh wanted to rip up nasty old carper, primer ceiling to floor, and move in.

I balked. After all that time in military quarters and rentals I wanted COLOR!! He sprayed primer everywhere, then sprayed the nasty popcorn ceilings. Then my older kids, a few friends and I painted. COLOR! Originally the kitchen, dining room, hall, stairs (all of which open onto each other) and family room were painted the same color. 2 years later I decided to repaint the living room a nice sage green. And I repainted the doors and trim in that period as well.

But for 10 years the open floor plan kitchen/dining/hall/stair stayed the same color. Until 2 months ago when I was washing the stair walls, for the millionth time, and noticed that in several spots I had washed away the paint altogether. Time to repaint!

Only I took another month choosing a color. Which meant several visits to the local home improvement stores, several sample cans of paint, lots of sample boards, one painting of the hall... only to find that the color was much too warm to go with the tile. And lots of input from my adult daughters, who moved home for this past year.

In the end I finally found a color I liked (Olympic's Frosty Pine) and decided not to paint an accent wall. BY the way, I love Behr's new Paint + Primer. It covered well on the first paint color we tried in the hall, and then the new color painted over that covered in 1 coat as well.

On to the kitchen....