Kitchen Colors

As of now our kitchen still looks something like this:

No paint yet.  But we've been thinking about colors so that when we're ready to paint we'll have an idea of what we're going with.  Remember our post on Purple In The Kitchen?  Well sure enough, here's the pallet we're settled on for right now:

What do you think?   Here's the palette from Behr, including a color that approximately matches those (grimy old) counter tiles:

The white, "moon rise" will be the cabinet color, but we're not quite sure about the other colors.  The kitchen is divided into two sections, the main area and a sort of nook area that leads to the basement door.  We were thinking about doing the main section in "delicious berry" and the other area in the "gray timber wolf."  Behr.com has a tool that allows you to upload a picture and paint the walls to get an idea of what different colors would look like.  Here's what we did to the photo at the top of this post:

So what if we switched the colors?  Well, it would look something like this:

Not great images, but it gives you the idea.  So which do you like better?

A Tiny Problem With Some Very Small Ants

Yep.  We have ants.  Not tons of them, and not the big house-eating kind, just a few tiny little ants.  Still pretty gross.  They are sugar ants and true to their name they found our sugar bowl.

Some friends and family suggested ant traps and ant sprays to ward off the pests, but since our problem was still small we wanted to see if there was a simpler, cheaper, and more environmentally and pet friendly way to deal with the ants.  With a little research we found suggestions such as pouring boiling water on the colony if you can find it or tempting the ants into eating borax, cornstarch, or cornmeal which will kill the ants.  Our problem still didn't seem bad enough to resort to killing entire colonies, so we kept looking.

Finally we found some natural ant deterrents.  We had a sneaking suspicion that ants might not like vinegar and it turns out we were right.  We've been cleaning our kitchen counters and floors with a vinegar/water mix from the beginning and we've never seen a single ant in our kitchen (knock on wood).  We also discovered that ants don't like peppers or cinnamon.  You wouldn't like it either if there was a pile of black pepper twice your size in front of you.  Death by sneezing can't be any fun.

It didn't turn out that we needed to resort to pepper or cinnamon, because once we removed the sugar bowl from the picture, the ants lost interest pretty quickly.

Just to be sure, we cleaned the whole area, as well as the windowsills nearby (where we were pretty sure they were coming in) with a 50/50 vinegar and water solution.  In the future we'll be keeping our sugar, as well as any other sweets, in sealed containers that the ants can't make their way into.

For more information on natural remedies for sugar ant problems as well as instructions for a natural borax ant trap check out this article on ehow.

There are also several good tips in this discussion forum ("we have pets including chickens and small children"). 

Over the Weekend

Despite some rainy weather and lots of work and school work that had to be taken care of this weekend we managed to get a few things done around here over the last few days.

We removed all of the last little bits of the enclosure from our front porch and started scraping the paint in the areas where it is peeling.  We will pressure wash the whole thing then paint the exposed areas to protect them until we can do the whole house.

Orchid got a little taste of the outdoors (literally at some moments) on her leash.  We don't plan to let our cats outdoors on their own even though we have such a nice neighborhood and yard.  It's just safer for them to stay indoors.

We did a little yard work, including cutting back the big rhododendron in front of our house.  More photos on that later.

We got out and harvested our raspberries.  Until now we've just been picking at them, but we wanted to take advantage while we still have them, so we pretty much cleaned the bushes off.  What a crop!

Finally, we enjoyed some Sunday morning rain and a breakfast of fresh eggs from our next door neighbors chickens!  Orchid kept her exploration indoors.

Top projects for the week ahead are:  Weeding the garden, pressure washing the porch, painting the bare spots on the porch, looking into getting recycled porch paint (more on that if we are successful!), and continuing to work on the kitchen so that we can start using those cabinets.  We'll see how it goes!

Kitchen Progress

One of our priorities for the last few days before we have to be fully moved in to the house is kitchen.  We want to get the kitchen as clean and as finished as we can so that we are able to use it once we are living in the house.  There's no way that a full kitchen remodel will be in our budget anytime soon so the plan is just to strip and paint the walls and cabinets to make it as pretty as possible for now.

The kitchen before:

We've made some progress but also hit a few snags along the way.  Click to keep reading and see what we've been working on!

Purple in the Kitchen

In between packing I've been doing a lot of thinking about decorating the new house.  One of the first projects we'll have to tackle will be the kitchen.  We want to take advantage of the overlap of the house and apartment to make the kitchen livable before we have to start bringing in food and dishes.  I've always been a fan of light, bright kitchens, but for some reason my mind has been stuck on dark wall colors with the kitchen's already light cabinets and countertops.  Maybe I'm remembering Joi's dark gray kitchen with her white cabinets: