We bought this old house about 3 years ago. When we were looking for homes to buy with our real estate, I requested that this one be the first of the day since we probably wouldn’t like it judging from the pictures. Everything was BLUE. The carpet was blue, the walls were blue, the curtains were blue, the countertops were blue, and the kitchen floor, well, you may have guessed it… BLUE! Blue, blue, blue! But when we walked inside this house we saw past all the blue. The floor plan was open, the ceilings were tall, the number of rooms were right, and the closets were huge. It was perfect for us!
The project I’m working on this week can be seen on the right. This kitchen backsplash has cost us less than $20 to install and paint.
It’s pretty awesome if you ask me.
Here are a couple pics of our downstairs when we bought our house:
The blue doesn’t come through the picture very much, but trust me. Everything was very blue about this house. Except for the wall color in the kitchen/dining area. I kept that. But I’m thinking about changing it… that’s another post.
Little by little we started to make changes. We put in a laminate wood floor and a tile floor downstairs.
We had some awesome friends come over and help lay the kitchen tile.
All that hard work wiped my handy husband out!
So, little by little the blue went away in our house.
I can’t go on without giving a special mention to one of the main focal points of our house that changed its look more than anything. My mom made me a stained glass piece for Christmas. It’s gorgeous. We still need to finish out the trim and caulk and add crown to the top, but it’ll get done eventually. We seem to be really good at getting projects mostly done for a while. 😉
We added special touches here and there. Painted the cabinets in the bathroom, glued a laminate floor down in the main floor bathroom, rearranged the cabinets in the kitchen to have an actual island instead of a peninsula, and this week, well this week we got our new countertops in! Hurray! We have successfully gutted every last bit of blue out of the house! Well, the main level, anyway… So, yes! New countertops.
We decided on Jamocha Granite laminate countertops. I thought this process would be a relatively easy one, but no… our house is old and the walls aren’t square. So, we hired a company out of Evansville come and get us all set up with the right measurements for our new countertops. They did a great job. The handyman who came actually had the same name as my husband: Tim Perry. The the guy who made the cardboard templates was another guy named Tim. There’s just something awesome about handymen named Tim, haha!
The cool thing about the Jamocha Granite finish is that it will look good if I ever decide to paint my cabinets white. I imagine that’s a long time from now, but hey, you never know!
So I started to think about changing up my kitchen backsplash. I liked the tile look. I didn’t like the tile price. I’d painted them dorian gray already to tie it into my front room color. But I wanted something new and fresh and cheap inexpensive! So I thought about those fake ceiling panels you see at your local Menards/Lowes. I bought some and put them on my counter next to my paint chips.
I liked the dark one better than the stainless steel or the white, but the dark one didn’t have any variation in the color and from a distance you couldn’t see the pattern. It was just dark. I looked for tiles with more color variation and didn’t find any I liked. I learned a long time ago not to settle for something I didn’t like just to have something, so I’ve spent a lot of time looking and waiting.
Then I had an idea! I saw a pin on Pinterest that inspired me. Maybe I could wallpaper my backsplash! I thought about maybe a wheat grasscloth pattern but still really liked the tile. So I started googling different tile wallpapers to find one I liked. There were so many options and I wasn’t really sure which one to choose. Then, while browsing at our local Menards, I saw it. It was only $12 something for a roll. It was a pattern I liked! So I bought it and brought it home. I figured that it was worth playing around on it with some different paints to decide if this would be a good route to go or not. So I bought some different metallic paints and went to work.
My favorite color combination was with Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze Paint as the base coat topped with Rustoleum Metallic Accents Bronze Medal lightly painted on and brushed off with a foam brush.
Here’s what the process looked like this weekend:
After I got the colors just right I added 2 coats of polycrylic.
We bought brown outlets and covers for the backsplash, except for the one by the sink with the switch for the garbage disposal. I’m painting that cover because it was going to cost $40ish dollars to replace it. So, I’m painting that cover. The cool thing about this wallpaper instead of the ceiling tile panels isn’t just the price, but I was worried about how the outlet covers would go on. No gaps between the backsplash and the covers make me really happy!
We’re installing the countertops sometime this weekend.
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