wall arrangement

Cool Things in My Kitchen

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My new kitchen is full of awesome things and features. It’s a combination of things given to me and/or made by my family, and extra fun touches I added!

cute tea thingsWorking our way around the kitchen, the first awesome spot in the kitchen is my sink area. On the counter we have a little tea area, complete with a cute sign from a box of tea that my sister-in-law sent me from England! The sink itself is nothing too special, but the faucet is new and I just love it — the faucet pulls out and turns into the sprayer! It is so handy.

 In front of the sink we turned the cabinet fronts into tilt down trays. We used a Rev-A-Shelf kit to install the trays. These have added a great place to store sponges, scissors and a pen!

Kitchen sink

Next we have a bottle opener that my brother, Nickolas, made Matt. It has a really strong magnet inside it that catches the cap as it falls! So cool.

Bottle Opener

My favorite thing in the kitchen is my pull down recipe holder that used to be my grandmother’s! Also in this picture you can see the beautiful cutting board that Nickolas made us for Christmas last year!

Recipe Rack

Above the microwave is our liquor cabinet and I wanted to give it some personality… I lined it with a wild contact paper (so it will be easy to change later!) and it’s super fun!

Fun Liquor Cabinetwhisk me awayIn the picture above, the cute sign you see sticking out from under the cabinets says “whisk me away”. It makes me smile!

Next is my wonderful recipe holder that my grandpa made me. It’s full of recipe cards from my family, and recipes I’ve found in magazines and online. If a recipe is good enough to make again, it gets put onto a card and filed in my grandpa’s box. :-) I have the recipes sorted by category, and every recipe is inside a protective sleeve. This system works well for me because I can quickly find all of my favorite recipes, and the protective sleeves are easy to wipe off and clean!

recipe_holderKitchen wall arrangementI also have a really cute wall arrangement in the kitchen! Two of the pieces are by Curly Girl, who just has the cutest things. The other print is from Target, and the tea set is from South Korea!

Those are some of the cool things in my kitchen. What awesome things do you have in your kitchen?

Hide the TV

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When we moved into our new house earlier this year we gained a lot of space, but it was a very different use of space than what we had at our old house… At our old house we had a living room and a family room. At our new house we only have a living room; there is no family room (yet!). So, even though this house is bigger, suddenly we were short a living space. And this means that our TV is now in our living room.

Now… some people like having TVs in multiple rooms for easy TV viewing… but not me. I thoroughly enjoyed having only one TV in the house, and having it not in my primary living space. And others did too — I received multiple compliments on my not having a TV in my old living room. In that space we were able to enjoy conversation, parties, games, reading, and music without having a big TV there to distract us (even if it’s off, it’s still not pretty to look at). But, as I said, in this new house we don’t have the luxury of two living spaces any more.

Shortly after we moved in, and before my TV was “hidden”, we had some friends over who noticed right away that there was now a TV in my living room. They commented that it felt strange to have a TV in my living room… but I had a plan. I wanted to “HIDE THE TV” with a wall arrangement!

With the help of pinterest and my mom, I began to pull together ideas and pieces for my new arrangement. Some things were from arrangements at the old house, a couple things are family pieces (an old skeleton key from my great-grandmother’s house, an old key-shaped thermometer from my grandmother’s house), some were new, and some Matt and I made. The pieces all focus on home, love and beauty. (Who doesn’t want those messages portrayed in their living room?)  :-)

Here are a few boards and pins from pinterest that were especially inspiring:

When I felt like we’d collected enough materials, my mom and I arranged the pieces on the floor and then convinced my dad to help us hang everything up! (Thanks, Dad!)

Hide the TV - tv wall arrangementUS chalkboard mapNow we have a beautiful arrangement around our TV that I love to admire and my guests like to look at too. And it’s fun to talk about — Matt and I have colored in the states that we have visited together (it doesn’t count if we didn’t go there together!) and we put special markers on cities that have special meaning to us: we have a heart on Fort Collins (where we live), a heart on Muskegon (where we met), and a block M on Ann Arbor (where we went to school). And there are pictures of us in Muskegon at Lake Michigan, and on Horsetooth Mountain, overlooking Fort Collins.

Now this room feels cozy and comfortable, and it’s so much more interesting to look at!  (And soon we’ll even have some curtains too!)

Living room - hide the tv