Plaster & Disaster

Is your interest in my kitchen project waning as it continues to drag on? Well too bad, because I’m still working on it and thus will keep blogging about it. This weekend we were in Vermont visiting friends and family, and people kept asking us how the reno was going and if we’d be done soon. The answers: “It’s going,” and “no.”

BUT, we’re making progress and we will reach the end eventually. And in the meantime, I don’t have to worry about running out of things to write about on the blog. Today I have a quick project to share, and then Friday I’ll be back to share some more progress plus shots of the FINISHED FLOOR and a budget breakdown to-date now that the biggest projects and expenses are behind us.

Today’s post is about lighting. Most of our kitchen lights are recessed — which is great for our low ceilings — but we also have a pendant light over the sink and a chandelier over the island. The pendant is pretty nondescript, but has been looking especially lackluster since we partially disassembled it during the wall removal and never bothered to put it back together:

The chandelier is incredibly unattractive, and is also a major hazard. When there’s a table or island under it everything is fine, but when we’ve moved those items to do work in the kitchen like removing and installing floors, suddenly it is just a metal and glass structure hanging randomly in the middle of the room that anyone over 4’5″ is guaranteed to slam their head into repeatedly. I actually broke part of it with my head the first day we moved in.

And it only got worse from there. At some point in the last year Sam unscrewed the canopy in a fit of rage and started trying to take the light down, before he realized that there were live wires running to it and he probably shouldn’t do that (he’s not the most familiar with electricity…but at least he knew to stop). So it’s just been hanging there making us mad and looking totally dejected.

Murphy just has to be involved in telling the story of this light fixture

With the floor almost done, I finally decided the chandelier’s time had come. I really didn’t want to spend much on lighting given where we are with the budget (more details on $ spent to-date on Friday), and since we have such low ceilings I didn’t want to go too crazy with statement lighting anyway. I did want to find something with enough mass that it wouldn’t look too dinky hanging over the island, though.

Given Naomi’s dining room chandelier hunt, I thought this had the potential to turn into a months- or years-long search. Fortunately I found something I was happy with in about 45 minutes of online shopping.

At 36″ wide it seemed like the perfect size for our island (which is 48″ long), the price couldn’t be beat, and the reviews were favorable. I hit “buy” and the next week it was on my doorstep.

Installation was pretty quick. First I shut off the power to the ceiling box, and removed the old light by disconnecting the wires and unscrewing the light from the mounting plate. The new light came with several extender stems to easily change the drop length, and I opted to use just one of them.

It was as simple as pulling the wires through that, trimming them to length, attaching the new mounting plate, matching black wire to black wire and white to white, and then screwing in the fixture. All told it took about 20 minutes from the time I opened the box to the moment I flipped the breaker back on. It probably would have taken me longer if I’d bothered to take more than the one process shot above, but I didn’t. Sorry. Let me apologize with this after shot:

I’ve got paint chips on the island to pick a cabinet color — progress!

Ahhhhhhhh, so much better. The coffee bronze finish isn’t my favorite, but before I decide what to paint it (oil rubbed bronze or maybe something colorful) I want to get the cabinets painted so I have a better idea of the color scheme in the space. When the time comes, it will be really easy to take the light down, hit it with some spray paint, and then reinstall.

The unexpected win was that I ended up getting two new lights out of it. The package came with an extra metal shade (not sure that was intentional), and so I decided to take down the pendant over the sink, remove the glass shade, hit the canopy, stem, and extra metal shade with some oil rubbed bronze spraypaint I had on hand, and reinstall the light using the metal shade instead of the glass shade. Easy peasy!

Let’s see a side-by-side to remember where we started:

Right now it looks a little odd because it’s the same shape as the chandelier but they’re slightly different finishes, but I think it will look great once the chandelier is also ORBed or painted something more colorful.

And so for the price of $135, I have crossed kitchen lighting off the to-do list and the concussion-inducing chandelier is finally gone from our lives. Hurray!

This is part of our Tiny House, Tiny Bloggers series, in which we turn over Plaster & Disaster to some VERY tiny bloggers to tell their own story of transforming an ugly, old (doll)house into a fresh and modern (doll)home. Follow it from the beginning here.

Disclaimer: Inclusion on this blog is not an endorsement by Plaster & Disaster of the tiny blogger’s methods or design decisions. Plaster & Disaster cannot be held responsible for your terrible decor choices after reading one of their tutorials. All opinions are their own.

Tiny bloggers here! While Naomi blathers on about wedding flowers, and Sage continues to be defeated by the task of putting a floor in her kitchen, we’re excited to share some exciting progress in our home renovation journey!

When we last left off, we’d gotten briefly sidetracked making a $1 sheepskin stool every bit as chic and attractive as the ones being sold for many hundreds of dollars by places like Anthropologie:

To be fair, the scale may be a tiny bit different between the two…

You have to agree that neither looks at all like a bichon-frise learning to walk on stilts! We just love it.

But it’s not all cotton candy and roses over here! Today we’ve got some serious hard core renovation work to talk about. As you may remember from our house tour, we have a very narrow and cramped kitchen and then next to it a larger dining space:

As card-carrying (tiny)bloggers, we know that an open floor plan is the only acceptable layout. We’re not even sure that bathrooms should have walls! So we’ve known from Day 1 that this wall was coming down.

We were really intimidated given how long it’s taken Sage to do the same in her house (months of planning, a week of demolition, and now seemingly an eternity of follow up), but it turns out it’s not nearly as hard as she’s made it out to be! Our wall was gone in about 10 minutes using nothing but a hammer and pliers.

Maybe it’s also easier for us to make quick progress because we’re full-time bloggers, but we have plenty of responsibilities (remember, we made that stool) so frankly we’re not sure why Sage is always using her day job as an excuse for her lack of kitchen progress.

Anyway, we’re so excited about how open the new space feels!

We’re not positive that this wasn’t a load-bearing wall. However, we’re pretty light, so we can’t imagine it will be a problem. I mean, if it didn’t fall down right away, we’re in the clear, right?

We’re also excited to start planning for our dream kitchen! Of course, we’ve been pinning like crazy and are working on some mood boards to help define and guide our design. This has actually been a pretty intense process! We each made mood board mood boards (the mood boards that help define the style of your mood boards) and were kind of shocked that we were pretty far apart! We’ve worked hard to find a common ground between shabby chic on one hand and farmhouse on the other. It took a lot of long, searching conversations, but we really do think that our marriage is stronger for it. It is so critical in a relationship to be able to talk about the important things.

However, while we finish these up we wanted to get your advice on the layout that we’re considering. We want to put the kitchen on the outer two walls of the back left corner, with a wall for the fridge and cabinets on one wall and then the sink (hello gorgeous farmhouse sink, you will be mine!) under the window.

We’ll obviously have some open shelving. Do you think one wall is enough, or should we do it all open?

Then we’ll do an island for the oven and range, and then plenty of room for the dining room table.

Hopefully we can also fit in plenty of storage since our house has zero closets, and of course we’ll need room for a bar cart. What do you think?

We can’t wait to be back soon to share our mood boards for the space, as well as keeping you posted on our steady progress (spoiler alert: goodbye wallpaper!). In the meantime, we’re relieved that ~~this house is still standing~~ this project turned out to be so easy!