The major kitchen task of painting (most of) the walls is now finito. It's so much more refreshing to look at an entirely painted wall rather than random swatches and samples stuck everywhere...
So, from square one:
I had a messy, messy kitchen. But of course, in line with the way I usually do things, I didn't do the practical thing first, which was clean. Instead, I just moved things around as I went along, including dishes, plants, electrical cords and then of course all the big furniture and wall hangings.
All of the switch covers I took out to my handy ventilated screen porch and threw them on the floor to put a fresh coat of spray paint on them and make them all the same white, and clean them up a little.
Always good to keep all the screws together in one place. In my case, I was basically freshening up white switch plates anyway, so I didn't have to worry about the color of the screws, which normally come with the heads painted the color of the plate. Just something to keep in mind in case the need to spray paint switch plates in any other color comes alone... ;)
It really wasn't too bad, except that it looked like the kitchen had been through an earthquake or two.
I went through and pulled off all the outlet and switch covers, and also removed the metal cover of the ventilation fan that sits on the wall above the stove. (Ew. It needed to be cleaned anyway.)
I put the first coat on in one evening, then waited for it to dry before doing the second coat the following evening. After the first night it looked something like this (from the hallway):
Messy. !!
But then I put the second coat on last night, and cleaned up quite a bit -- I moved that bulky cabinet thing into the living room so the hallway has opened up quite a bit.
My kitchen actually echoes now. Might have to work on putting in a textile or two!
This kitchen has been a work in progress since I moved in. The apartment was built in the 1960s sometime, and all of the cabinet work and everything was built then, and had been mostly unchanged... until KATE CAME ALONG, that is.
Just for before/after sake, here are a few photos of what the place looked like before I moved in, in much its original state. Good ol' 1960s-style wood stain and all (and check out how there are a million cabinet doors!!)...
(with sister!)
This wall is not original to the apartment. It used to be open to allow for a bit more kitchen counter space that L'ed around, and then to a large living room in the front that looked down onto the main street. The wall was put in to provide a meeting area and storage space in the front for the coffee shop.
Down the hall.
Sooo... for your viewing pleasure....
THE MIDDLE STAGES (before I even painted the cabinets):
... and AFTER (today! hooray!):
The plan is to turn the door next to the fridge into a giant chalkboard.
The hallway is in some serious need of wall decoration, but I'm so happy with the way the color brightened it up.
I really gotta do something about the way everything is displayed on top of the cabinets, or what is displayed there, but someday I'll figure it out. And the "backsplash" (although there isn't really one) needs some decoration desperately!
Some kitsch for my kitch!
The view from the living room. I was under strict orders not to, under any circumstances, repaint the green cabinet (which is fine, because I would never want to!) -- it is full of weird old kitschy stuff, cookbooks, and baking ingredients. And note the one mismatched kitchen chair! The three red ones were found on the curb in Madison, WI.
And that's the whole of the painting saga in the kitchen. It's the second time I put a coat of paint in here... and probably the last.
Whew!
The best part will be figuring out what the do with all this clear, bright wall space now. ;)
The apartment I'm in now is the first place I've had the opportunity to really dig in and decorate how I want. That's the benefit of my landlord being my sister! ;) But really, it's been and continues to be a huge challenge. My tastes are always changing, and I've also learned over the last couple years that there is often a huge difference between what I think looks awesome in a spread in some glossy architecture magazine, and what I actually feel comfortable living with. Sometimes they are polar opposites, and I've ended up aiming for, say, some stark, minimal contemporary space and then finding that I want to transform it into something cushy and cluttered and comfortable. It's hard. But it's also fun. So...
Where to begin? My kitchen is the weirdest kitchen there is. And right now, I'm not even going to skirt the truth, which is very simply that it is an utter disaster. It's a mess. It kind of looks just a little bit like a bomb went off in the middle of it. Sometimes I'm in awe at the amount of dishes one person can a) own, and b) pile up. It's scary. It's beautiful when they're all clean and put away. But let's be honest, how often is that?
My kitchen functions as the central room and also the main thoroughfare. It connects with a wide-open door to the living room, another door to the bedroom, and the short hall that leads to the bathroom and out to the back screen porch. It's a pretty big kitchen for an apartment, so there are no complaints there. My small apartment-size fridge fits in a custom-made nook so it doesn't stick out into the room and take up space. There's enough room for a good size dining table in the middle. There is so much cabinet space that I'm sometimes overwhelmed, but it serves as all-purpose storage since it's a little hard to come by in general. But I still think it's a weird kitchen.
This is what it looked like when I had obviously cleaned a TON, and before I painted the cabinets red:
I painted the kitchen cabinets a stark, crazed red last winter. At first, I liked it. Anything was better than the 60s-era yellowish thing they had going on; their original style. Now that I look at pictures, though, they weren't so bad. I was just sick of them more than anything. They're nice cabinets, really, but man, there were a lot of them. When I first moved in, I took off all the tiny cabinet doors up on the top-top and turned all that space into open display space where my sudden collection of jadeite now sits, among other things.
I painted a giant rendition of Joost Schmidt's Bauhaus poster on one wall to go with the red-is-rad theme:
Red, black, and white were apparently my go-to's, but let me be the first to admit that an entire kitchen in red and black is not exactly inviting. Not if done incorrectly, and I did it incorrectly. Mostly because red is an exciting, energetic, kind of nervous color, and I did almost nothing to calm it the heck down. And partly because I had a gigantic seafoam-green metal cabinet scrounged from an old hospital on the Bauhaus wall. And also because there is very little natural light that enters this room -- one north-facing window, and it just started feeling a little bit... angular. And hodge-podge, and not in a good, harmonious way.
I like comfortable. I have a lot of hard-edged furniture. My floors are terrazzo; they are hard and grey-beige and not very cute. I needed to soften things up. So the first step was to head to the home store and get some paint samples. And hooray! It was easy! My kitchen walls are about to be transformed to a hue called "Aqua Breeze," which is the bottom-most swatch on this wall. I've used up almost the entire sample can already.
Can't wait to show the finished walls! And then, of course, it's on to the decorating...
I declare today Bibliophile Friday. Why? Well, is it redundant to say that books are awesome? Because they are. Some are, anyway. A lot of them. I work at a used bookstore where a huge quantity of every-subject-you-can-possibly-imagine comes across the counter daily. I see a lot of the same stuff -- titles and authors you could probably guess at, like Danielle Steel, James Patterson or Dr. Phil self-help books. But we see a lot of great cookbooks, too, and art books, philosophy, pop culture, travel (and music and movies, too)... the list goes on.
I thought it would be good to share the scoop on some of my favorites, and new things I come across, so hopefully, if I remember ;) -- Friday will be my show-a-book day! Yay!
Because I've been cooking up a storm lately, I thought I'd start with an oldie, one that sits in my kitchen cabinet more for decoration than anything else, but one that I have referred to in the past just for fun. Betty Crocker's New Picture Cookbook, printed in 1961 by McGraw-Hill, is oh-so-quaint mid-century. Betty, Betty, you little devil, this cookbook is one of my favorites.
I remember reading somewhere that a vast percentage of Betty Crocker cookbook readers at the height of her popularity in the mid-20th century thought she was a real person, rather than what she actually is, a brand name made up by General Mills. She's gone through many makeovers during her lifetime, and I have to say, she looks pretty demure in her spine portrait. There is actually another book that came out a few years ago by Susan Marks about the history behind the icon, called Finding Betty Crocker: The Secret Life of America's First Lady of Food. The portrait comparisons on the article's page are endearing.
As far as this specific book is concerned, I'm mostly in love with the cover. The colors are adorable. The entire book is illustrated, however, by Joseph Pearson, and it's one of those typical everyone-is-SO-cheerful! kinds of cookbooks.
It's worth noting that I'm just finishing up season 2 of the show Mad Men, so I can't help thinking of Betty Draper when I look at some of the illustrations of the happy-bappy housewife whipping up dinner for her picture-perfect husband and two kids. The nuclear family, remember?
It's kind of amazing to think of the culture that these cookbooks appealed to 50 years ago. This book was geared to women and only women, as the makers of food and the satisfiers of family in the home. (Today, I just ran across an old falling-apart copy of the Settlement Cookbook, another classic from the beginning of the 20th century, and even that, right in the first page, boasts "The way to a man's heart." Gotta love it. That would never fly today.) But housewife-ing was a full-time job, presentation being the keystone.
And maybe one of my favorite photos is right in the beginning, at the Betty Crocker test kitchen in Golden Valley! Look how pristine everything and everyone is! It looks like a girl's dream come true. If only I looked that adorable while decorating cakes and lining up my loaves of bread perfectly!
Here's to a wonderful piece of nostalgia, and some darn good classic recipes.
