Well, it’s taken a week, but I’m finally updating the pictures of my recent kitchen project.

If you’ve been visiting us long, you probably know that I never take “before” shots. I have nothing against them; it’s just that I never seem to remember to do it. When I want to share before and after pictures on the blog, I have to look waaaaayyyy back to see what I can find. I was lucky this time to find photos of my kitchen in three stages of development.

This was from February 2010, around the time that we made our dining room into a homeschool room, and our family room into a dining room.

Then I found this one from around a year ago, when we were waiting to have new countertops installed. I never did end up blogging about that…

We had pieced together an assortment of plywood, drywall (covered with a tablecloth), and extra pieces of flooring.

Our children especially liked the floor boards. One of them suggested that we skip the new countertops and just use those, because, “they match the floors PERFECTLY!”

But eventually, our new countertops were installed, and we loved them. We went with a solid surface countertop with an overhang for a breakfast bar, under-mounted deep sink, and beautiful oil-rubbed bronze faucet. We also removed the border.

I never did take pictures at this point. What was I thinking?

Anyhow, I had been tired of that border and was glad to see it go, but later decided that the kitchen looked rather plain without it. So, a few months ago, I added these wall words above the sink:

Better! But it was still rather plain all around it. This was what led me to last week’s little kitchen project.

I decided to have some random photos, old and new, printed in black and white on an 8×8 foam mount, then place them in the kitchen to fill up some of that big empty border space.

I did just that, and it was cute, but something wasn’t quite right. As I stared at the verse, “In everything, give thanks,” I got to thinking.

Each of the pictures represented something to be thankful for.

Hugs.

Vacation.

Smiles.

Brothers and Sisters.

So I took the pictures down, and headed to Michael’s Craft Store for black 8×8 frames, a white paint pen, and some letter stencils. Then I labelled each frame with various things the pictures remind us to give thanks for.

Here’s how it turned out, angle 1.

Angle 2:

Angle 3:

Closeups of the “Thankful” photos:

And one more little kitchen project, inspired because 1) I’ve been wanting to do some sort of letter art for a while, and 2) we needed something above our patio doors.

I found this website where you can download letter art for free. Hundreds of designs to choose from for each letter. A bit of playing around with paint.net, and I came up with this design, which I had printed right along with my photos:

One of our family’s favorite mottos! Here’s how it looks over the doors:

I think that concludes my projects for awhile. Unless my husband goes on another business trip. Then I can’t make any promises. :-)