Painting Is Easy. Choosing a Color Is Not.

The day we walked into this house, I knew I wanted to paint the kitchen. It took me months to finally decide on a color. Some days I wanted to stick my head in the sand and hope and wish someone else would do it for me. No such luck. My husband is a smart man. He would NEVER pick a color and paint without my approval. He would hear about that (and not in a good way) for the rest of his life. #happywifehappylife 😉

I had to think of the house as a whole. I like for the rooms to blend or compliment each other. I wanted a bold color but also one that would blend. Talk about a challenge…for me. I’m not good with that kind of stuff. Give me a recipe book and I can cook for days. Give my an empty room and tell me to decorate it…insert head in sand! Or better yet, I may just run away!

Here’s what I knew…I knew what I liked. I knew what kind of bar stools and kitchen table we were getting. I also knew that I’m always drawn to the beach and all of those beautiful shells! Now, how to bring it all together and have it look nice.

Like I wrote in my last post about painting the kitchen, I googled & pinned for days. After much ‘research’, I finally decided on a blue, a nice navy blue. Great! The hard part is done, right? WRONG! Try going to the paint store and picking out a nice navy blue. Ugh…

I narrowed it down to ‘Inked’ and ‘Very Navy’ but ‘Very Navy’ scared me. It was really dark!

These swatches stayed taped to the wall for a few days but I’m sure if you ask my husband he would say a few weeks. One morning over coffee, I took the plunge and chose ‘Inked’. That’s it. It’s only paint. If I don’t like it, I’ll just repaint it a neutral tan color and be done with it. Gotta keep moving forward…

In the process of choosing the color, I did start painting over some of the painted on brick. And of course, every session of nighttime painting begins with a glass (or two) of my favorite red wine!

Before…

And the after….

Woohoooo!! Brick be gone! Now, let’s get going with that blue!

#icrackmyselfup

Stay tuned…

Change the look of your kitchen with just a little paint!

It’s no exaggeration to say that I spend ALOT of time in my kitchen. I’m a stay at home mom with 3 kids, 4 if you count the husband, and they require to be fed on a routine basis….like every 10minutes, no lie!

When we were house hunting, finding the perfect house with the perfect kitchen was a bit on the impossible side. I almost nixed the idea of putting an offer on the house we are currently living in because I HATED the kitchen. I hated everything about it…

the old cabinets

the white appliances

the cream color formica counter tops

the light colored tile, the red paint, the gold sponge paint on top of the red paint and the painted on faux brick on top of the red paint.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the color red. I really do. But it was too much for the kitchen. It wasn’t my style and it made me not want to be in the kitchen.

I firmly believe that the most memorable family memories are made in the kitchen. Any conversation or story that I tell my kids from my childhood, always has us in the kitchen. So I was determined to turn this kitchen around.

I pinned, I googled and I browsed Home Depot. I knew what I wanted but I couldn’t get the husband (or the checkbook) to go for it, no matter how hard I tried. Deep down, I knew it was unrealistic to redo the entire kitchen so I opted to work with what I had. I still pinned and googled but this time I added a few key terms to help with my search…oak cabinets, white formica, white appliances. I wanted the internet to show me what color paint would work best with what I had because I knew I could get the husband on board with that and he would love it too! I could change the look without draining the bank account. I was determined to LOVE my kitchen again and a little paint could bring me that love…right??

Stayed tuned for Part II…

Easter Ain’t Over Til The Hambone Gets Crocked

My favorite comfort food of all time…Crock Pot Split Pea Soup!! Both my mother and my father would make this anytime they had a hambone and it always made the house smell wonderful but did I ever eat it?? NO. It looked disgusting AND it had peas in it AND a giant ham bone. No thank you. Looking back, I really wish that I had tried it…at least once, so that I could have something to compare it to.

It’s always around the holidays when I feel homesick the most and it’s usually when I do best cooking. So, this Easter was no different from any other..gotta save the hambone for some home cooked soup. You know, making comfort food to comfort my heart, or at least try.

Split Pea Soup has got to be one the easiest soups to make and it brings great comfort to my heart and also to my belly. It makes a ton so get ready to share with family or friends or stick some in a ziploc bag and freeze it. It freezes great! I recommend freezing it in single portions. That way when the husband is out of town and you don’t want to cook but you are looking for a lil’ comfort…just take a bag out of the freezer and voila! Comfort food without any work.

Rinse the peas and put in the crock pot first. Next, add the hambone. Add the potatoes, carrots, onion, salt and pepper. Fill with water, leaving about 1/2 inch at the top. Cover and set on low for 10 hours.

After 10 hours, your soup will look like this:

Remove the hambone very gently.

Stir the soup. The peas will lose their shape and the soup will thicken. If you want an even thicker soup, mash the potatoes with a fork…I love a thick pea soup!

Shred the ham with a fork and add as much or as little back into the soup as you would like. I like just a bit but to my husbands bowl, I add a bunch!