Inspiration Strikes When and Where It Will

For a bit of fun on this gorgeous Friday afternoon, I thought I'd share with you where I got the inspiration for the layout on my patio. 

In 2006 I used the Quikrete Walkmaker to make a concrete patio on the back of the house.  This is what it looked like the day it was finished:

Hey, look, I actually had grass before I had dogs...

(It didn't actually dip in the center like that -  I had to splice two photos together to get this shot).  The border around the edge would become a "hedge" of herbs surrounding the patio with green and lovely scents and lots of bees. 

Last year, tired of cracking mortar, weeds, and upset stones from the ground settling, I chipped out the entire thing, fixed the grade of the sub-surface, and laid the stones in a more organic pattern; intending to allow the grass to fill in between the stones, which would (a) create a softer, prettier surface to walk on, and (b) allow Nature to take its course on the patio instead of trying to fight it every step of the way.  This is what it looked like the day I finished it:

You can see here the GIANT Rosemary bush on the upper right, which was *tiny* in the first picture;  the little tree behind it is my Mexican Orchid Tree (Bauhinia mexicana),  which is the plant in the pot on the lower left in the first picture - barely a stick then!

it does have grass between the stones now, by the way

Another shot of the stones, which are arranged in concentric circles beginning at the four corners of the patio that meet at the edges like ripples in a pond. You can see the herb border fully grown in here - this was taken about a month before that Raging Death Fungus of Doom ripped through my entire garden and killed everything last year.  Sadface. :(

But here's the fun part:  the inspiration for the stone layout:

I have no idea who these players are, but they're totally cheating.

Heeheehee.  This is a screenshot from the game Gauntlet: Dark Legacy for Playstation (yes, Playstation *one*).  Specifically, this is the Lich's crypt, the Lich being the Big Bad Guy at the end of the first segment of the game.  I love this old game, and I still play it all the time;  and I've always loved the stones in the grass on the floor of this level.  Ever since I first saw it I've wanted to make a little grassy stony patio like it.   Obviously mine's a bit different, but this is where I got the idea.

LOL.   :)



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Re-Inventing the Kitchen

After having spent two days going through all the photos I have stored online of my various projects - I still have no idea where to start.   I suppose the first thing to do is introduce you to my house, a room at a time.

I'll start with the kitchen, since it's (a) the one I've done the most work in, (b) the space I'm the most proud of, and (c) the space I love the most AND hate the most, by turns.  Heh.

When I moved into my house in 2004, I found the kitchen to be smaller than I thought it would be - the apartment I'd lived in before had an enormous kitchen with tons of cabinet space, and though the new one looked bigger, it turned out it wasn't!  Storage was immediately an issue (hence the aforementioned love-hate relationship).

Here's the kitchen as it looked about a year after I moved in:  plants and dishes and junk EVERYWHERE - and a weird pseudo-sage wall color that I experimented with briefly:

 (The walls in the foreground aren't purple; that's 

the light from the dining room window)

That looks like a crap-ton of cabinet space, doesn't it?  Try having a bad back.  When it goes out on me, I can't bend over to get anything out of the lower cabinets, so I can't keep anything I use on a regular basis down there, just in case.  Which means that my upper cabinets and pantry are crammed full of stuff, and there's hardly anything at all in the bottom half of the room.  (THAT issue is currently being addressed, and I'll update as soon as I finish the project I'm about to start working on over the Memorial Day weekend). 

After having played with colors and accessories for a few years, I settled on a design I liked (for the fourth time) in 2008, and in the Summer of 2009, I spent two months putting my plan into action - without spending a single dime, thanks to a friend who unloaded about fifty gallons of unused paint on me, knowing I'd find a use for it.  

"Tile" Backsplash

First on the list was a backsplash.  Rather than installing tile, which would take time and money I didn't have, I decided to paint a tile backsplash onto the wall.  I do love a good trompe l'oeil.  

The first step was to apply a sponge-type treatment to the wall, to bring out the existing orange-peel textural treatment that the house came with, which would form the basis of the "stone" look.  

Next, I stenciled "grout lines" onto the wall in plain off-white latex paint...

...which gives the effect you see here. 

This is also a pretty good example of the original finish on the kitchen cabinetry - we'll get to that in a minute. 

From there, I went back in with a sponge in five different browns, greens, blues, and a taupe-y red and shaded each stone a different color.  I cut each color by half with water to create a colorwash or watercolor effect, so that the "stone" look I did in the first step would show through the color.  Some of the "tiles" I left the original color and only shaded around the edges to give them a 3-D look.

I also, at this point, picked up some new canisters to replace the mis-matched ones in the previous picture.  These were $4-6 at Hobby Lobby!  

I created the labels myself on my computer:  "Meth" (bread flour), "Rat Poison" (wheat flour), "Arsenic" (sugar), and...rice.  Ran out of ideas.  

I really can't tell you how proud I am of those "tiles."  To this day, people that come to my house for the first time have to touch them to make sure they're really painted on, and not real tiles.  Biggest. Compliment.  EVER.  :) 

Cabinetry

The next step was to get to work refinishing the kitchen cabinets.  I dreaded the prospect of sanding down ALL. THAT. WOOD...right up until I realized that about 40% of the visible "wood" was actually veneered MDF and would be un-strippable.  Yay, I thought, I can try that new paint technique!   There was something I'd seen on television that I'd tried my hand at on small pieces of cardboard and wood scraps in my shop, but had never done large-scale - this was a perfect opportunity.  

So I set about de-glossing and cleaning the cabinet surfaces, removing all the doors and drawers and hardware, and painted the cabinets.   Not a solid color:  I used a strié technique on a wet brush with various blacks and browns, allowing a bit of the original wood tone to show through, and voila:  

Cabinets that look like they have been stained a darker brown!  Done entirely with paint, for: less mess, easier than sanding and staining, faster, and more easily changed in the future. 

The bottom cabinets have been painted in this picture;  the top are still the original finish color.









Once the cabinets were finished, I painted the walls. Actually, I painted the walls in the entire common area of the house:  the living room, kitchen, entry hall, and dining room are all visible to each other, and I was tired of trying to design around what you could see of one room from another, and decided that ONE unified, neutral color scheme throughout the entire common area would be much easier to deal with.  I mixed the color myself (with all that free paint!) into a shade I called "Matagorda" - I matched a sample of sand a friend brought me from Matagorda Island on the Texas coast.  

After having wrestled with the idea of door-less upper cabinets, and then being finally convinced after seeing the idea done beautifully by another friend of mine who lives in San Antonio, I decided to go for it:  I removed the doors to my upper cabinets and painted the inside a grayed, muted Robin's Egg blue (the exact shade is my favorite color in the world; I call it "Laura-Blue" in my notes, tee-hee).   The ceilings of the rooms in the common areas are also this blue color. 

Lo and behold, the kitchen was done:

Hey, look, just in time for the overhead light fixture to stop working!  How about that!

 

Camera flash = not a good substitute.  

The little things - accessories, cutting boards and containers, various things across the tops of the upper cabinets - are always changing.  I'm one of those people that just MUST re-do everything every year and a half, and the little things at least every couple of months.  It's fun. :)  

The other reason I chose the kitchen to show you first is that I'm about to start two related projects over Memorial Day weekend:  I'm building a pot rack to help out with the storage crunch, and I'm bringing in a new dining room table and beginning the process of re-decorating the dining room.  The color scheme there is the same as the kitchen; but I'm playing with the furniture and the draperies, and, at some point this summer, will be building in a bench seat in the bay window.  :) 

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