Sunday Project

The life of a doctor's wife includes lots of free time on weekends while the hubby is working. This weekend I put that free time to good use and actually started and finished a project all in one day! Woohoo! When we moved in I found this little shelf unit thing shoved in a corner of our laundry room/mud room/sun room/'we don't know what to do with this' room.

I'm guessing that it was a built in from the original 1950's kitchen. It had been painted blue, with vinyl flooring glued to the bottom and a lovely speckled laminate top and metal edging...

I couldn't let this little gem go to waste - what with all the nice storage it could provide:

So, off to Home Depot I went! I bought spray paint (because I'm too impatient for brushing on paint) and new cabinet door pulls. The rest of the tools/supplies I already had: painters tape, tape measure, sander, scrapbook paper and modpodge. 

It took me all day, but my final product is well worth it! Let me introduce you to our new dining room storage cabinet....

I took off the metal edging and spray painted the top with a fun sea foam green/blue color that I already had in my craft box that goes well with our living room couches. Then I put down painters tape in a chevron pattern and sprayed over it with a metallic silver. 

My lines weren't perfect...but did I mention I'm impatient? Yeah - all those measurements took way too long, so I kinda just eyeballed it. 

I spray painted the rest of the unit with a semi-gloss black to match the rest of our black furniture, but it was looking a little plain. 

So, I pulled out some black patterned scrapbook paper and modpodged it into the shelves on the left side. 

It's hard to tell from the picture, but the top and bottom shelves are black with white polka dots and the middle shelf is an argyle type pattern. 

Next I added some fun new silver door pulls and voila!

It's always fun to remake an old piece into something new and functional! 

Livable Living Room

One of the biggest selling points of our new house was the nice open concept living/dining room that also opens onto the kitchen. The only thing holding this wonderful space back was the orange accent wall and yellow/brown sponge painting. Before, the whole room blended in with the beautiful original hard wood floors:

Now, there is a nice contrast with the white baseboards and grey walls and a darker grey accent wall:

Two of my favorite wedding gifts: silver alligator tray and handmade one of a kind pottery

We were able to pretty much use all of the same furniture we had in Little Rock

Loving this fun sideboard that brings a pop of color to the room (and provides great storage for some of our wedding gifts) 

The only thing that's missing from our living room is lighting! There is no overhead/ceiling lighting in the living room portion so stay tuned for that project coming soon!

Yummies

So this blog will mostly be about our DIY projects, but I had to do a post about our yummy dinner from the other night.

It was my first time really cooking in our new kitchen - with all my new fun wedding gifts/kitchen gadgets. I'm a sucker for seafood so I made crab cake sliders with spicy mayo. I can't recommend this recipe enough - so good!

CRAB CAKE SLIDERS WITH SPICY MAYO

YIELD: Makes about 15 sliders

INGREDIENTS:

Crab Cakes:

1 pound crabmeat 

1/2 red bell pepper, small diced

5 scallions, finely sliced

2 garlic cloves, minced

1/2 lemon, juiced

1/2 cup finely crushed crackers or panko breadcrumbs

1/4 cup mayonnaise

1 large egg

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon dry ground mustard

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon salt

Dash cayenne pepper

For Cooking & Serving:

Olive oil

15 slider buns or halved dinner rolls

1/2 cup spinach, arugula or sprouts for topping

Spicy Mayo:

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 1/2 Tbsp. lemon juice (from about 1/4 lemon)

1 1/2 Tbsp. chili sauce, such as Sriracha

1/4 tsp. kosher salt

1/8 tsp. freshly ground black pepper

DIRECTIONS:

Prepare a large baking sheet lined with foil or parchment paper. In a large bowl, combine all crab cake ingredients. Mix ingredients with your hands. Shape into small patties and place on the baking sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to cook. (Can be made 1 day ahead)

Meanwhile, make your spicy mayo. Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and stir to blend. Cover and refrigerate until ready to use. (Can be made 1 day ahead)

When ready to cook crab cakes, drizzle about 1 1/2 Tbsp. oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. When oil is hot, carefully place crab cakes, in batches, in pan and fry until browned, 4-5 minutes per side. Carefully flip crab cakes and fry on other side until golden brown, another 4 minutes.

Place sliders onto buns. Top with mayo and greens, and serve.

Enjoy!

Bitty Bathroom #2

On to bathroom #2:

Sam's bathroom was a victim of the horrible sponge painting and was PINK!

The reddish pink paint color really made the tiles look pink and the teeny tiny room was very overwhelming! Nothing a coat of nice light grey paint and a new door couldn't fix:

Now the tiles look so much better and the bathroom looks clean and even a little bigger! 

Itty Bitty Bathroom #1

I think the easiest way to show all of our projects will be to do a post for each room as we finish them. Right now the only rooms that are totally finished are the two bathrooms, the kitchen and the living room. So I will start with my bathroom, and I say "my bathroom" because we have 2 itty bitty bathrooms that are side by side, as in - they share a wall. Yeah, its weird, but it's also become our "thing". For those that visited our LR house, our bathrooms were directly across the hallway from each other. We've grown to love having our own getting ready spaces, so this layout was perfect for us! (don't get me wrong, I would love to have a huge master ensuite with double sinks etc...but that's just not in the cards/budget)

Just to refresh your memory...here's what my bathroom used to look like:

The walls are textured and were painted a yellowish brown with palm trees painted on the cabinet doors and forest green trim! And yes - those are bamboo towel rods..

Our first step in redoing the whole house was painting ALL of the trim white (aka priming and then like 5 coats of paint). Next we painted all the bigger rooms (see future posts). But I had a big decision to make on the paint color for my bathroom. I am partial to clean, cool colors (duh...did anyone see my wedding?) so I did some googling. Have I mentioned that google is my best friend when choosing paint colors? I am completely incompetent when it comes to staring at paint chips in the store...BUT if I can see a room painted on a blog, I can choose so easily! Anyway - so I found Sherwin Williams - Sea Salt.

It was the perfect lightness and not too blue or too green as to clash with the cherry wood mirror and vanity and brown tile. So I got a tester and brought it home (just in case!). Well, my bathroom is SO small, I did an entire coat with less than a quart of paint! So I ran back to the store the next day for another tester and finished the job. Added in a grey bathmat from Ikea, a chevron shower curtain from World Market (is anyone surprised?), new grey wedding towels from Macy's, patterned hand towels from World Market and a fleur de lis towel hook courtesy of Sam's sister Mary.


The finished product:

These two pictures were taken before my wonderful husband replaced ALL of our interior doors. He measured, cut, sanded, installed etc. 6 regular doors and 3 different sets of closet doors, all while I was away at the beach! 

So here is a pic with my pretty white door:

The End!

Up next: Sam's bathroom

Before...

So before I start this next post I need to give a big shout out and HUGE thank you to our amazing family in Denver who has put in countless hours of work on our house: Betsy and Jon, my mom and dad, Heidi and Justin, Luke, and Chris and Patty - we would never be this far without all of you!

So as I promised in the last post - I will show you the "before" pictures that I have of the house - before it's makeover:

Front

Office/Guest Room

Bathroom #1

Guest Room

Dining Room

Backyard

Master Bedroom

Mudroom/Sunroom/Laundry Rom

Living Room

Living Room

No...you don't need to adjust your screen - there really was that much yellow in the house! Not only was almost every wall that color (some with sponge paint too!) but ALL of the trim in the house was painted yellow or dark brown! blech! Now here are some detailed views of some of my *least* favorite aspects:

The orange wall

The brown trim

The sponge painting

*again*

Tacky Bathroom

The green stripe

I can't tell you how much primer/paint/man hours it took to repaint EVERY room in the whole house! Not only that - but inside of the closets and the ceilings. My handy hubby even scraped a popcorn ceiling all by himself! Now, I know y'all want to see the "after" pictures, but we're not quite done putting the finishing touches on most of our rooms. So I'll give you a sneak peak of our new paint colors:

We went with Collonade Grey from Sherwin Williams for most of the house, then Mountain Pass for our bedroom and the accent wall in the dining room....and WHITE for the trim :)

I will follow up with updates on each room once they are completed! Stay tuned

We're Back!

Apologies to my 5 blog readers for my absence! :) My *husband* and I had just a few big life events that got in the way of my blog updates. In the past 2 months we: 1. Got Married 2. Sam graduated Med School 3. Honeymooned in Jamaica 4. Moved to Denver 5. Bought a new house 6. Sold our old house 7. Got new jobs......I might have forgot some things, but phew! It has been total chaos in the DeStefano household. But that brings me to our new and improved blog....for house #2! We had so much fun updating our first home (a little bungalow in Little Rock) and were sad to leave it, but our Denver home has even more opportunities for DIY projects! Our one-stop-realtor-shop aka cousin Justin took us to 25 houses in 2 days back in March and we were totally overwhelmed by the difference in housing costs between LR and Denver. But despite that - we did find ONE house that had the layout we were looking for and was (pretty much) in our budget. So, our new adventure begins with our red brick ranch house! The previous owners had quite a...let's call it interesting...style. In the next blog post I will be uploading some "before" pictures of the house, and honestly - sometimes I can't believe that we actually bought it while it looked like that! BUT we were able to see past the bad landscaping, horrendous paint job and bad style and find a house that we could really make our own! So stay tuned because the past 3 weeks have been chalk full of house updates and DIY projects for me to blog about.