COUNTER PRODUCTIVE

It all started with the chairs. When the old IKEA chairs we’d had for ages kept collapsing, it was time. Anders and I did some online searching, which wasn’t fun because I couldn’t find anything I liked, and then we couldn’t find anything we agreed upon. We went to IKEA, MIO, Leander & Persson, and finally, Svenska Hem, where we found the ones we ended up with, almost exactly a year ago. They are a sort of smooth lovely avocado-ey green.

And getting the chairs kickstarted the kitchen renovation project. Over the course of the year that followed, we got new appliances: dishwasher, microwave, stovetop (induction) and oven (convection). Anders does all the renovating and installing in our house, so things happened a bit at a time. We got new countertops: darker, slightly speckled with rectangular edges instead of rounded ones. We got a new fan for over the stove that lights up when you pull it out. We went tile shopping and found the perfect tile to replace our previously perfect tile.

While I was in the US during March and April, Anders went into high gear and started the big jobs: tiling, grouting, painting the woodwork, sending the cabinet and drawer fronts off to be professionally painted. Then he spackled and sanded the walls (which were wallpaper before). When I got home, the entire kitchen had plastic draping over everything, but it wasn’t enough to keep all that fine sanding dust out, so in addition to the renovation work, I did a THOROUGH cleaning of every cabinet and drawer, which meant going through everything and purging stuff we never use or don’t need.

The cabinets are now the same color green as the chairs. And the walls are painted the lightest possible version of the same green. I painted the shelf white that holds coffee mugs, then went shopping and found a new kitchen mat (plastmatta), a new container for paper recycling (which sits in the corner), and new curtains. The curtains are hard to see in the photos, but they are a linen floral print that has hints of green, brown, grey, and the same peach-tone as the floor tiles. The splash tiles are a light grey-white, with a rustic finish. The last thing was hanging some stuff, including the chicken plates I found at an antique mall in North Carolina, and now we have a lovely new updated kitchen!

The chairs that started it all

Chicken plates!

Mood: happy
Music: Idde Schultz—Högre Mark