Weekend Happenings: Kitchen Decisions & "Shopping"

The chalkboard wall still needed to be primed at this point.

This weekend Gilbert and I had planned to start demo'ing the wall that separates our kitchen and dining room. We were going to tear down the sheetrock on the dining room side to at least expose what ever is lurking behind the wall. Now we already knew that this was a load bearing wall and after many hours of discussions and phone calls to a local lumber yard, had decided that we would need to purchase a couple of engineered beams to support the load instead of just using regular ol' lumber. So with that settled we thought we were ready to at least start some part of this daunting project.

Well Saturday came and went. We just weren't quite ready to take the plunge and make the mess. The logistics of emptying cabinets, unscrewing said cabinets, taping off the dining room so dust wouldn't fly all over our new chalkboard wall, dealing with electrical wires that needed to be re-located, etc just seemed like too much to tackle at the time. So we stood up, brushed ourselves off, and the hubs went out for his weekly yard duty.

I, on the other hand, had to get over my disappointment of not starting this particular task and turned my focus to something else. The chalkboard wall in the dining room. I decided to go "shopping" around the house looking for items to style the buffet. I did have to briefly call the hubs back in from the yard to hang some shelves from Ikea that we've had sitting in our basement for literally almost a year. And I love how it turned out!

Items left to add: an orchid to replace the cloth flowers, maybe a new lamp and a wood serving board - I've got my eye on this one made by A Sunny Afternoon Co.

The second quick and easy task for the weekend was replacing the light fixture in the kitchen. We were so blessed that the previous owner had really great taste when it came to light fixtures, and was willing to leave the fixtures when she sold the house to us. We have re-arranged the fixtures around in the house and had a few sitting in our basement just begging to be put up. While I loved the current fixture, it just didn't put out much light so we once again decided to "shop" in our basement and put up another fixture that we had just sitting down there. There is so much more light now!

I love that we turned a disappointing (at least for me - the one who just wants to take a sledge hammer to everything....maybe not so much to my neat freak, but oh so loving husband that really just didn't want the mess) weekend into a successful, light stress, easy DIY weekend that made such a dramatic difference in both of these rooms. Now to challenge my inner artist and put the chalkboard wall to good use.