Weekend Project

In blog world, I'm led to believe that people knock out demolitions, renovations and furniture construction in one weekend.  I've come to believe that this is a lie.  Dave spearheads most of our projects and it can make me feel a little disconnected from the "fun" of our home improvements.  One fine Sunday about four weeks ago, Dave decided to take a nap in the basement.  This may be the first nap he's taken since we moved into the house.  I took it as my cue to pick up a powerdrill and demo our pantry, which happens to be located at the top of the basement staircase.  We can delve into my motivations to do so at a later date in time.  Here is the before of our pantry.  The previous homeowner had yellow doors with green flowers on it, which we removed within a few weeks of moving in.

 

It's a pretty sorry excuse for a pantry.  Here is mid-demo;

 

The former homeowner had a really sharp eye for color.  I think everyone loves the look of their food products set against lime green.  Mmm.

It's important to note that this took me all of 45 minutes.  After the demo was done, so was I.  The truth of the matter is that the only thing I know how to do is demo and paint.  I'm slowly learning, but the only way to really accomplish that is to take on a project all by myself....with the good and the bad.  But why (and the better question is how) can I do that when Dave can do everything?  So Dave was reluctantly drawn into the pantry project.  He had the genius idea of building boxes on casters for garbage and recycling that can be tucked away so that we don't have to see them.  

 

Here they are before being covered in wallpaper and trimmed out.  In the meantime, we'd each taken a crack at painting the pantry with chalkboard paint.  I've been wanting to paint a room black for awhile and the pantry is the only "room" that I was actually allowed to try it out on.  Here is the glorious after picture of the completed garbage/recycling bins and painted pantry;

 

So you may be wondering how the bins came to be covered in cow print wallpaper.  I'm obsessed with wallpaper...obsessed.  But it's very expensive and very intimidating.   I'm not even worried about the commitment of wallpaper and the nightmare that is removing wallpaper.  I'm afraid I couldn't hang the stuff correctly and that would be one, huge expensive mistake.  So I thought I'd buy a roll and try it out for the pantry project.   If you go to the website and take a look around, you'll notice all sorts of beautiful wallpapers.  I didn't want to pick anything with color because I thought it would clash with the food items on the shelves.  I do realize that choosing an animal print for a nook that houses things that we eat may have been in poor taste.  But I'm a carnivore and make no apologies :)  We went ahead and papered all of the shelves that I cut;

 

(I'm so serious when I'm sawing things.  Please take no notice of the fact that we're doing this in our basement.)

 

Right now you're probably thinking, whoaaaaa.  And not in a good way.  We had the same reaction.  So Dave decided to paint right over them and it's actually pretty cool.  You can see the cow print coming through, but it doesn't assault your sense of sight.  Here are the after shots;

 

 

Bruno is such a camera hog.  I prettied up the top shelf with some cake plates and I may take another picture because now these are really bothering me.  The moral of this story is that it didn't happen in a weekend, or even a month, but in blog world I could probably lie and get away with it.