Mini Kitchen Renovation

Just over one year ago, I signed my name on the deed to a 90-year old house in the east end of Toronto.  It's far from being my dream home, but it had all the basics, and I knew it would be a good place for raising our little girls. As much as I would love to spend big money to renovate and make our house a more enjoyable space, the sad reality is we can't afford it just yet.  I'm not even sure when we can.

So for now, we're stuck making small improvements to make the space we have more useful.  Surprisingly, some of these little improvements have made a big improvement!  Take our mini kitchen renovation, for example.  We added shelves and a rail to a narrow kitchen wall.  The shelves were cut from pine boards, sanded and sprayed with a clear protective coat.  The rail, hooks, and brackets are all from Ikea.  I was rather nervous about the brackets, as they look quite cheap (and are, only $1!), but against a white wall they blend right in.  The whole set-up cost less than $50, took less than an hour to prep and install, and now we have a cool little additional storage area in our kitchen.

Paint or Sleep

It is done.  In only 2-1/2 weeks, we packed up our apartment, stored our stuff, moved in with family, and set-up our place to sell.  Just this past long weekend, we moved (with the help of 4 friends, thank you!) on Saturday, and spent 3 nights painting and cleaning in the wee hours while our little one slept.  The home that we lived in for 5 years is now emptied out, listed on the market, and waiting for a new owner, with fingers crossed.

I've never painted walls before, but I'm hoping it'll be one of many home DIY skills that I pick-up over the coming years.  We ended up saving a few hundred dollars by doing the work ourselves, but lost out on many hours of precious sleep.  I read up on some painting tips prior to starting, so that even before I cracked the paint can lid, I knew how to cut in, correctly apply painters tape, and reduce brush strokes from the get go. But of course, with anything, I learned a few things the hard way:

• If you can only buy one brush, make it a 2" angled brush.  The 2.5" angled brush recommended by some is too thick and awkward for some finer jobs, like doing edge work around wall-mounted hardware.
• If you bought colour-matched paint, and need to buy more, bring the can lid to the store.  The lid has a dab of colour, plus a detailed description of what colours were used to mix the paint.  Otherwise if you just rely on the store swatch, you seriously risk buying a very different colour. (It happened to us!)
• Do at least 2 coats of paint.  Yes, we saved time by doing 1 coat, but the work was much patchier than if we had applied a second coat.
• Make sure your painting area is very well lit, so you can see where you've applied/not applied paint.  In other words, try NOT to paint at night.
• When rolling on paint, use the short handle of the roller.  It's tempting to attach the roller to a broom handle so you don't have to use a ladder, but it's a lot more difficult to get even coverage with a long handle.
• After you painted each wall, do a visual inspection to clean up any drips.  It can be done very quickly and easily with a brush (for painted areas) or damp cloth (for unpainted areas) when the paint is still wet.

It was a lot of work, but the place really perked up after a fresh coat of paint.  A few well-placed pieces of furniture and accents, and it's all tied up beautifully into one nice little apartment package.

Home

Big news: we bought a house!  A real house-house, with real walls, real stairs, and a real grass yard for growing tomatoes and climbing beans.  A house with two floors, waiting to be filled with laughter and memories.  Our new neighborhood has a lovely young family appeal to it, and we can't wait to put down roots in this new community.  It's overwhelming, exciting, and we hope in the end it'll prove to be the right decision.

That all being said, the next few months of our life will be a cyclone of tasks, moving boxes, and getting things done.  We'll be living out of another home, moving most of our stuff to a different home, getting our current home ready to sell, and envisioning life in our new home.  I'm not sure how often I'll be able blog, but it'll certainly be on my mind, and I'll do my best to check in every once in a while.

As part of the moving process, a staging consultant visited our apartment to advise us on how best to set-up our space to sell.  She gave us some great advice that I wanted to remember (for our new home) and share with all of you:

• Set-up each room according to the function that it serves.  Creating physical / visual room separators help define the space; say, adding a floor rug to a den identifies that area as a separate room.  This is especially important when working with open concept areas like our own.
• If your space is naturally dark, as ours is (due to a lack of natural light), go easy on the heavy wood furniture and dark colours.  Choose light or transparent colours when decorating and selecting furniture.  Consider lighting fixtures that have multiple bulbs.
• Wall art should be placed appropriately, so that it is relative to the arrangement below it.  We had a giant painting above our sofa that was hung too high, such that the two together didn't look like one well-connected space.  We were recommended to move the painting just 6" above the sofa.

We will dearly miss our apartment (seriously... our sweet daughter was born here!), but hey, it's always hard to let go of such a big piece of your past.  We're ready to start a new chapter in our life, in a new place, and are focusing efforts on a bright future ahead.

Onward ho.