It's been a productive long weekend! I finally finished all the painting (those high bits in the hallway were nagging at me), installed curtain rods, installed bookshelves, completed the kitchenand moved more stuff over. My official move-in date is next saturday and I'm hoping that the only things left to move by then will be the furniture that I can't carry over on my own.
Shots of my kitchen are below. I'm pretty happy with how it's come together. In the first shot you can see the wall opposite the counter, sink and oven (the kitchen is long and skinny). Next to the fridge is an IKEA cutting board table I've had for a few years. I painted in black awhile ago. The shelving unit on top of it is a $7.99 Value Village find. I picked it up last week. I think it was originally a homemade shoe rack and I was thinking that I would use it for the same thing in my hallway. However, I didn't like the look of it in my hallway and realized that it would sit perfectly atop on IKEA sideboard unit, so I painted it black with the rest of my chalkboard paint (it was originally beige) (the chalkboard wall is opposite the fridge so the black shelves balance the room well) and plan on using it to store my glassware. Perfect! And the canvasses on the wall were a quick black and white paint job. A more complete (as complete as I can get a shot of the kitchen anyways) photo of the kitchen is below.
I can't believe it took me a couples days to figure this out, but I've been wondering why IKEA changed the design of their spice rack...as you can see in my photo, the top rack doesn't provide enough space to put bottles on it and I couldn't figure out why the metal pieces at the bottom were so long (and thus aesthetically annoying) - especially because in other photos of said spice rack from other people's kitchens, I didn't see evidence of the same thing. It's kind of evidence of how incredibly observant I am and at the same time NOT observant at all that I noticed this difference, but didn't clue into the fact (until 5 days later) that it's because I installed the spice rack upside down. Right. Well, at least it's easily fixable and my spice rack space shortage will be remedied as soon as I make the switch.
