Kitchen redecorating

The very first thing I did when we moved in was to paint over the kitchen cupboard doors and change all the handles. The kitchen was a beautiful peachy pink and dusky blue colour scheme, with brown and gold marbled handles. Very chic.

I used white knight laminate paint to change the colour of all the doors and drawers, and bought the new silver handles from Ikea. I did all this the week we moved in, because I was so happy to be able to do anything to the house, because we weren't renting anymore!

The laminate paint works really well, as long as you follow the correct procedure with cleaning and undercoating first. Many people have said they had no idea the doors had been painted. You just have to be pretty careful not to scratch them, one of our corner cupboards kept knocking the adjacent drawers and a bit of the paint has scratched off, but I'll be able to touch it up when I do the other shelves.

It took me almost 11 months to paint the actual walls, but I finally got around to doing that in the last school holidays. I still have to finish painting the architraves and need to go back with the laminate paint to do inside some of the shelves, but it has made such a difference, I'm really happy with the results.

Our home

So we've been in our house for almost a whole year, 11 months now... and we did end up settling, eventually! Once that was all finally sorted out I switched to full wedding planning mode and continued to be that way until the wedding in March. After the wedding and honeymoon I switched again to garden and landscaping mode, and then back to teaching/designing modes... none of which allowed any time or space in my brain for blogging, but I'm going to try and keep it up a bit more regularly now.

The following images are a little taste of what's been happening over the last 11 months, I will dedicate some posts in the future to specific renovations and "areas of improvement" around the house.

Our house, from the front


Christmas 08

Getting hitched (aw)

New pup, Harley

Long overdue update.

Gosh it's been a hectic mess.

Settlement was delayed because ANZ bank stuffed up the application, but luckily after lots of going back and forth with our solicitors and theirs, the owners were willing to grant us tenancy before settlement, as they had already moved out.

We planned to move on the friday, so John was on his way in his car with his dad to pick up the removalist truck, when some woman went straight through a red light and T-boned him. He is ok (just banged his head) and so is his dad so that's a relief. He took his dad to the doctor to get checked out because his shoulder was quite sore, and just had a bit of a rest to make sure they were both was ok.

Mum and I (with Aunty Lyndee) went to pick up the truck, took it back to Palmerston and started packing it all up. My friend Lucky and JA's friend Hart came and helped us so much with packing up the truck, we got everything over to the house in 2 loads.

Fast forward to monday, and I get sick with the flu for the next week and a half, no almost nothing gets unpacked. Add to that the stress of getting a call from the NRMA saying that the woman claimed it was JA who ran the red (!) AND the bank stuffing up the loan application AGAIN (more forms to fill in and post). Luckily the witnesses from the accident came through and NRMA declared JA was not at fault, so he booked his car into the repairer, only to be told it would be written off. So now we need a new car.

That was a week ago, it's now been 4 weeks since we moved in and still no settlement, because the ANZ bank ONCE AGAIN stuffed up and didn't send us the right forms to fill in. We have now filled in the EXACT same form 3 times. Settlement is supposed to be in 2 days, but it won't be because of another idiot mistake they made, sending stuff to mum's bank without a covernote and telling her the wrong information to put on a bank cheque. *sigh*

But we are in our new house and it's great! Will post pictures soon.