Wednesday 28 July 2010

Shabby Chic kitchen progress & clueless about apples!

Hi everyone,
Another post to show my latest progress! As you can see from my last post kitchen was mostly dark - I have now repainted most cupboard fronts, just 4 more to go.

The door fittings came from ebay, ex MFI stock, and by buying in bulk, we were able to get them very inexpensively compared to standard DIY store prices.

Other progress is that we have obtained a full bathroom suite from Freecycle, white and fairly modern, completely free. This will be our next project as soon as money allows, possibly late Autumn, as our current suite is avocado green. It has saved us at least £200 on the main fittings, so we'll now keep an eye out for tiles at our local stores that are not too expensive. Of course if something suitable crops up on Freecycle that would be amazing too!

We have obtained a bathroom mirrored single cabinet for free from a house that was gutting their bathroom, it was in fairly poor condition inside but after a wash was acceptable. I then covered the shelves with some nice Cath Kidston paper and for now it's certainly much better than it was, and better than having nowhere to put things in! This would have cost at least £15.


Left you can see our crab apples have started to blush - we have no idea what to do with them! They are edible so hubby has started to take them to work, saving us around £1.50 per week, but I will look online for recipes as to what we can make.

Any recommendations for recipes, and indeed care of a crab apple tree? We are learning so much this year, it's hard to keep up with ourselves!

My next (small) project will be to repaint a Welsh dresser we purchased for £40. I will post pictures soon to ask for your inspiration and advice. My ideal result would be something like this (on right), which I saw a very talented MSE member complete on the Shabby Chic thread!

It looks amazing and I can only hope for such a result - only thing is I worry about the cost of paint and varnish - I guess it may cost around £30 but then at least we will have something we love - right now the pine colour is not my favourite!

Thanks for reading and do post your thoughts and comments, I will post another update very soon with hopefully a finished kitchen!

Thursday 15 July 2010

Summer plans

Hello everyone and sorry for the delay. With work and high rennovation costs, we've had a lot on, which I hope end of July and early August will finally calm down.

We have been able to do a lot in our new home these past few months, but not only is it a costly time but so tiring as well! You also learn how inadequate you can feel when DIY is daunting... however it's a great learning curve. My next project is to re-cover some £5 wooden chairs we bought second hand, then repaint a bathroom, all as inexpensively as we can to try and claw back some of what we have spent.

My next post will hopefully show some recovered chairs with before and after shots, and some re-painted bathroom - with before and after shots too! However I know I need to finish off the kitchen first - still a few doors to go, so some elbow grease and a final push needed.

Does anyone else here have some porojects on the go - or planned for the future?