kitchen, check.

Ahhh………  I am laying on my couch as I type this, enjoying the wonderful feeling one gets when one has hunted down, captured, and brought home the perfect and most-needed piece of furniture.

Andrew and I moved into the new house the first weekend of January.  We painted our bedroom, and moved about half of our stuff over.  And, boy, do we have a ton of stuff.  In fact, since both of us had at least another month on our previous leases, we ended up leaving a lot of furniture and other junk at our old places for a few weeks.  We finally got everything moved into the new house throughout February, and we realized that we didn’t have enough furniture.   We just kept all this stuff in boxes and then stacked it up in random corners.  (Well, the boxes did create some additional seating for houseguests, haha.)

We weren’t really ready to spend a lot money on new furniture.  We both started scouring Craigslist for shelves, cabinets, and a buffet for the kitchen, as well as lurking around the interesting pools of humanity known as Goodwill and Salvation Army.  Other than morphing us into total misanthropes, and providing compelling evidence for birth control, we learned what hard work it is to find decent furniture.

So, finally, we have found it.  THE buffet.  The one that we had been looking for all this time.  Andrew spotted it last week, and when we went together on Saturday, we both loved it.  Andrew stood next to it to scare off any competition, while I ran to the back to find a salesperson.  It’s from the Salvation Army, so there was a discount since it was there for more than 30 days.  How had it avoided capture for a full month?  We couldn’t allow anyone else to take advantage of this clear oversight!

I love it so much.  I couldn’t wait to get it home so I could unpack all the kitchen boxes and fill it up with all the junk!  Here’s the before and after pictures:

My new buffet - still at the Salvation Army

And, in my kitchen. YAY!

What an adventure.  To be fair, there was some pretty neat stuff every so often.  Finding a good piece made it worth all the hours meandering through particleboard mazes.  For example, I saw these chairs that wouldn’t really fit in my house, but that I love and make me wish I had one room I could make totally mid-century modern:

these were only $40 each!

Our other project in the kitchen was to build a shelf above the stove for the microwave.  Here’s the before:

nice, 40s era cabinets with random empty space above stove

And after:

lovely, no? Andrew got skillz.

Andrew just bought some brackets, braces, whatever they are called, and some wood, painted it up, lost a ruler behind the stove, and presto!  A beautiful microwave/cookbook shelf.  That Andrew, he’s pretty handy.

So, we’ve got the kitchen done, except to hang a few pictures.  Now on to the other 5 rooms!  And front yard.  And back yard.

Tags: diy project, furniture, kitchen