Thess Socety Blog

I like having easy access to things and a stepladder is a must in my house. This past week I picked up the Ikea Bekvam stepladder because it is the perfect height and it comes with a handy hook for hanging the stepladder. I want this stepladder hung in my kitchen where it is nice and handy, but if it's going to be on display all the time I want it to be cute... Read more »

My kitchen has no outside walls. That means it has no windows directly to the outdoors. UGH. I love light, I love sunshine streaming through windows and lighting up my house. This was not the case in my kitchen. Last year I renovated the space and added a pass through window in one of the walls.  Now the sun can reach the kitchen - hooray!!  But it is still not a terribly well-lit space. Cue my desire to open the wall between the living and dining rooms - the dining room is the brightest room in the house.  That, however, will be a big job because the wall is a supporting wall (at least I'm treating it that way, even if the building inspector didn't think it was).  I decided to tackle the opening from the living room into the kitchen instead since I know for sure that wall isn't supporting. Read more »

I am thrilled with the results of my latest kitchen project.  When I remodeled my kitchen after moving in, I bought stock cabinets from Home Depot.  They are the bargain basement version of cabinets but they did have wood fronts which is a feature I wanted. What they offered for the drawers was the bare basic drawer slides that only let 75% of the drawer slide out so you never can see what is in the back of the drawers easily...   I found these full extension drawer slides on the D. Lawless Hardware website and ordered enough to do  all the drawers in my kitchen. Click on photo to go to D Lawless Site Once I received them and had a look at the instructions, I was TOTALLY intimidated and hemmed and hawed for a few months before tackling the job.  As it turns out, replacing existing drawer slides makes this project a BREEZE.  Once I figured out the best approach, it took me 10 minutes per drawer to pull out the old slides & install the new.   Easy peasy!!   Here's how I did it....

Let me say right off the bat that my dishwasher is a bare basic model that doesn't allow for custom panels.  I seem to be the only person in the world who isn't fond of stainless steel appliances and my appliances are all stainless steel... sigh. Read more »

I love shelves!  In my small kitchen, I don't have enough cupboards so I use whatever I can find to add extra storage.  I've built a tiny pantry cabinet, added a sideboard for extra counterspace and storage and now I've found a free hutch top that I hung on the wall.  I LOVE it!!! Check out my latest project and the tutorial! Read more »

No, I'm not finished... is anybody ever finished?? lol I still have two walls & the ceiling to paint and the floor to refinish BUT pretty much everything else is done! Welcome to my quest to create a light, bright farmhouse kitchen from a room with no windows, 4 doorways, un-salvageable original cabinets and a miserable 3' of counter space.  The only thing going for the space was the oak floors. Read more »

I found some blue Ball jars!!!!!!!!!!! Woot!! I decided to make a new soap pump for my kitchen. Here's my beauty of a soap pump - I'm thrilled with it! Read more »

A blind corner in my kitchen is now filled with a functional custom kitchen cabinet thanks to Ikea products! Here's what I picked up from Ikea: and here's how I put it all together Read more »

My kitchen remodel project took on a new life when I installed the butcher block countertops. Love is too weak a word for how I feel about them! When I left you in Part 2, I had just ripped a hole in the wall to create a passthrough that would allow more daylight into the room from the adjoining laundry.  It's been so nice to use the kitchen without turning the lights on all the time.  The project got bumped up a month when a friend offered to pick up the butcher block from Ikea for me (a 10 hour round trip).  I left the counters in the spare room for a few weeks to acclimate to the house and then got to work cutting them down to size for the new layout.  In the meantime, I continued to work on removing the old countertops.  Max decided to get into the act by chewing through the exposed dishwasher hoses.  GAAHHH!  Bloody cat! Read more »

Back to my ongoing kitchen remodel project! I needed a couple of extra kitchen cabinets and the stock cabinets in my kitchen are now discontinued, so I picked out a white stock cabinet from Home Depot to complete the run of cabinets on the pass-through wall. Since I can't match the doors, I decided to keep this cabinet open, but after all the uppers were installed on that wall, I wasn't happy with the crappy looking white cabinet - LOL.  Bear in mind that I haven't yet finished painting all my cabinets, so the wood ones will be white when this odyssey is over... Read more »