The Plan For Our Kitchen

Hi, everyone! I had to take a little break this past week (and a half) because things were just super crazy! We got home from Colorado last week only to leave a couple of days later for Amarillo...and have somehow managed to keep up with all of our normal activities as well. We also have four showers, two birthday parties, and numerous Halloween activities to go to this month...so it's been really busy but really fun. Anyways...I'm back for the moment...and I'm going to write some about our kitchen today!

One of my favorite things about blogging is that I can usually sort out some of the craziness in my head when I write out a post. So, please excuse the explosion of my thoughts regarding our kitchen in this post. It really does help ;).

Our kitchen is probably the room in our house that I dream about more than any other, and it's easy to see why when you know that it looked like this when we moved in...

Ahhhhhhhh!!! It's like a horror movie. I know! I know. But really, the room has such  potential. Seriously, I am so excited about it, I can't stand it. It opens up to the dining room with the huge bay window that I have shown you before, so it has a lot of natural light. It also has a great layout, and, like everything else in the house, is very basic and bare so is pretty much a blank slate. The only things we've done since these pictures were taken is paint the walls and put in wood floors. I've attempted to accessorize, but it doesn't do too much good in this situation ;).

The cabinets are total crap (shallow, no shelving, literally falling off the hinges), so we want to replace them. The original plan was to gut everything sometime next summer...like really...everything, and put in some kitchen cabinets from Ikea. I've read great things about them, and have seen them in real life and love the look. I'm thinking the Lidingo system in white. 

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We also wanted to build them up to the ceiling to look custom with some pretty crown moulding, put in a new sink, hardware, frame out the fridge, new backsplash, new counters, put in a stainless stove and dishwasher, build a custom vent hood, put in new lighting...the works.

Then we looked at our bank account and laughed really hard. ;)

So that plan has recently become the "in a few years when we've save enough" plan. And by a few years, I'm guessing more than 2 or 3. In the meantime though, I CANNOT live in this ugly kitchen anymore. We were trying to be frugal and just deal with it, but I just can't. I need pretty things for my sanity day after day. It's a creative drain to live in a house where everything is bare and white. SO, we have begun brainstorming a new plan...which is to paint the existing cabinets, maybe add some crown to the tops, add some open shelving, change out the lighting, build a small vent hood, add hardware, and possibly add a new faucet.

I've sketched this and researched this SO many times and now I am pretty pumped! I just bought this paint sprayer, and am planning to start sanding the cabinets and painting sometime in the next month or so. I think we are painting them in Benjamin Moore Paper Mache. 

Here is some of my general inspiration for this makeover:

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Can you tell that I want to do open shelving? ;) And that's not even all of the inspiration...it's only just the tip of the iceburg. I have a zillion other kitchen pins on Pinterest.

I love these black nantucket pulls for our drawers.

And something simple like these black knobs for our lower cabinets.

And these knobs from Anthro for the 3 upper cabinets we're planning to leave up.

We will do open shelving on almost the entire wall above the sink (but will leave the uppers on either side of the stove). I want to do natural looking shelves, not painted or anything (we'll probably stain them with danish oil), and I want to use pretty brackets similar to these, also from Anthropologie. (I would like something black though, I think.) 

We are planning to leave the open shelving even when we gut the rest of the kitchen, so I'm willing to invest a bit more in that. Cannot wait to get them styled!

I'm not positive if we'll do a backsplash right now, since I would hate to rip it up when we gut the kitchen down the road, but if we need to we'll probably just throw some beadboard up, since it's timeless and cheap. 

I can't wait for a new faucet (and would LOVE a new farmhouse sink too, but we're trying to save money...), but I love this one from Ikea:

(We need a single-hole faucet to fit our current sink or else I would go with something more elaborate.)

For the vent hood, I'm trying to coax Bryan is building something like the one in this picture...(a mini version)

He acts like he's not excited...but I know he's secretly looking forward to it :)

So there's that. I need to end this novel of a post now, but I'm excited to get started! (Along with the zillion other projects we have halfway started, haha!) Also, I painted the fireplace last week! Well, just primed it. But I'm hoping to get it completely done by the end of the weekend. And I finally got curtains for the living room! I am excited to share those as well.

Have a great day!! Thanks for reading through the mess of my head.

Organized Home: Mail Sorting Center

One of my biggest organizational issues has always been where in the heck I should put the never ending amount of mail and paper that makes its way into our home. 

In our last house, I had two veeeeeery messy magazine files that were stuffed with every paper under the sun. We never knew where anything was which made doing taxes, making plans, and remembering important bills and dates pretty tricky. 

And then something clicked. (Hallelujah!)

I needed a simple but efficient way to file and categorize every piece of paper that came into the house. Sure, we have "The Big File Cabinet" that holds ALL of our important and long-term files and information, but I needed a temporary place to sort things that was out in the open and easy to get to. And it needed to be pretty :)

And then...I was in Target and noticed the cutest little file holder. It was meant to be. I snatched it up, took it home, and after a few hours of walking around in circles trying to figure out what kind of mail and other papers we receive and think are important enough to keep, I grabbed my label maker and came up with this...

Here are the categories in detail...

-Auto - Car insurance, invoices, repairs, registration notices, etc.

-Cards/Invites - Invitations from past events that I want to scrapbook, sweet cards to save, notes, etc. Invites for upcoming events are displayed somewhere else that I hope to show you soon!

-Financial - Banking and financial information, paid bills, statements, etc.

-Health - Anything related to health/eye/dental insurance, paid medical bills, invoices, etc.

-Home - Mortgage and home insurance information or statements, etc.

-Ideas/Notes - I write a zillion random ideas down, and now they have a place to go!!!

-J Ferg - Any information/forms/receipts from Bryan's roofing job

-LISD - Information/forms from the school district Bryan works for

-Made By Katy- Anything to do with my blog or Etsy Shop!

-Parker - Random notes that I write, newsletters from children's ministry, doctor's notes, etc.

-Taxes - Well...tax stuff :)

-To-Do/Pay - Bills that need to be paid, forms that need to be filled out, etc.

-Utilities - Statements or letters from utility companies

-Weekly Ads - This is where I put my favorite grocery store ads that I get each week. I also put my Red Plum coupons (that I haven't clipped) and any specials from Babies R Us, Target, etc. I have a special place for clipped coupons that I hope to share soon, too. 

Y'ALL. This has changed my life. We've been using this system for about 3 months and we have yet to see any paper piled up on our kitchen counter. It truly is the little things that make the world a happy place! 

I cannot get over how easy my new mail sorting center is to use and maintain. I check the mail, immediately throw away the junk, and then quickly file the keepers into their categories. It takes all of one minute. If we get a newsletter at MOPS or church, it's not a big deal because it has a place to hang out! If Bryan comes home with a stack of player stats...it's not big deal, just file it away!

Coming up with adequate categories took a lot of thought and some tweaking, but was so worth it! Seriously. Everyone needs to do this, in my opinion :). 

Once the files get full enough, I will clean them out and transfer the long-term keepers to "The Big File Cabinet". I say "will" because I haven't had to do that yet--that's how tidy and organized this system keeps everything. 

Of course, I needed it to be functional AND pretty, so I threw a quick little vignette together. I should also mention that I keep my mail sorting center on the kitchen counter (the cabinets above it hold my "Command Center" - you will see that later). The kitchen still needs SO much work (like a total gut job), but I love looking at this particular little corner...it makes me smile.

How do you organize your mail and incoming papers? Does it ever drive your crazy like it did me?

Have a wonderful day!