hanging home

Our kitchen is less than beautiful. You have seen glimpses of it here (and here as well) but the general gist is that it is full of mission brown cupboards, horrible spackle-textured benchtops and cabinetry that screams 1987. But it's very functional. Honestly, I wouldn't change anything about the layout or how the kitchen actually works, it is all just cosmetic things that I would tweek. Here is the farmhouse kitchen in all it's cluttered glory, just a regular Sunday afternoon here at Brindabella...

As you can see I really cleaned up for these photos, a totally 'styled' shoot *cough cough* I'm just keeping things realistic, right? Well, as you can see the farmhouse kitchen does indeed sport some lovely dark, dark cabinetry (see our pantry cupboard on the left). I'd love to take a sledgehammer to this cupboard and put in a beautiful dresser to house all my 'display worthy' ceramic kitchen items. You can probably tell by the original existing chimney breast that once upon a time there was probably an old combustion Aga in the space which now houses the stove, the oven and the weird hidey-hole above the oven which generally just collects junk. You can also probably tell we have lovely high ceilings and crown moulding. Bonus. Like I said, the bare bones are there, it's all just cosmetic. The wallspace (or chimneyspace?) above the stove and oven was crying out for me to decorate it. After some consideration about a collection of little kitchen prints like these I finally found the perfect solution...

Which brings me to the lovely stack of mystery items sitting over near the sink. On a recent jaunt to Melbourne I came across some seriously dirt cheap metal letters (at Supply and Demand on High St in Armadale in case you were wondering). Originally they were $39 each, reduced to $29 each and then on sale for 50% off. At $15 per letter I couldn't not buy them, and concluded that 'HOME' was the most appropriate word to be spelt out across the room which is at the heart of our home. And all for $60 instead of the original price which would've set me back $160, a hundred bucks in my pocket has me doing a happy dance (yes I'm a cheap skate). So 'home' they came with me (haha) and after a mini-meltdown by me that they weren't going to fit across the chimney breast as I had envisaged, I spaced them out on the floor to realise they would in fact fit, just a bit squishier than I originally intended. Phew.

Oh yeah and don't even mention the bright red and yellow extension lead running across our kitchen to the bedrooms. As I type we are missing half the power to the house so have been running leads everywhere so I can dry my hair in the bathroom and have a bedside light. Glamorous.

We decided that we would put up the H and the E first, butted up flush against the very edge of the chimney breast corner. The letters are made from metal but are actually hollow, with holes for picture hooks in the back. At first I thought I could just use a heap of 3M velcro removable strips as a less than permanent solution, but as you can see that was fairly impossible as there is no real flat surface on the back of the letters.

So a-picture-hooking we would go. Mr M got to work on his ladder, carefully measuring and marking with a pencil on the wall where the picture hooks had to be hammered, whilst I madly flailed by arms, paced and barked instructed from the sidelines.

With the H up we went for the E, but turns out the letters are not all uniform shape (the E being 2cm higher than the H) so we had a bit of fiddling about with hammering in a few different holes. Once the H and the E were up we measured exactly half way between them, but the O and the M are obviously a lot different widths (the M wider by about 15cms). After a quick arithmetic lesson we sorted out where the holes needed to be hammered and hoped for the best...

After a lot of standing back, head tilting and a few adjustments we think we got it fairly right. No letter obviously standing out as too high, too low, too close, too wonky? Personally I love it, it has given the farmhouse kitchen the little aesthetic lift that it needed, until we do something a bit more drastic like new cupboards and benchtops.

And after all that hard ladder holding and passing of picture hooks by me, and hammering and measuring by Mr M, we did do a happy dance around the kitchen like fools singing this...

Yes we are idiots. Other than that it was a totally uneventful and lazy weekend, which was more than lovely. Sounds like some others were up to the same...head over to Lou's place to check it out.

Photos by Emma Durkin for Cinderella at Brindabella