the family jules: Just a Kitchen Quickie

The wonderfully busy, stressful, project filled end of the school year is upon us! I for one am looking forward to the summer and spending time with family and friends. Summer is also a time when I usually can start and finish projects in a seemingly reasonable amount of time. The key word being usually!! I thought I'd share a couple of kitchen decor ideas I recently completed that pack a lot of punch without taking up too much time or money.

The first one was actually to solve a problem. The doors to my pantry were white, just like most everyone else's. It had always been a struggle to keep the doors and the door pulls clean. Everyone in the house touches those doors more times in a day than I can count. And that includes touching them with the dreaded "newspaper hands" as we like to call it. You know you just put down the newspaper and go open the white pantry doors and BAM black print is now on the doors! So I decided to just go with it and paint the pantry doors black. I used a satin black like this. Initially I thought about just painting them while they were still up, but my reasonable husband thought I would do a better job if we took them down so I let him. I placed the doors between 2 sawhorses so that they were lofted off the ground, but you could just place them on chairs, stools, etc. I used a brush, not a roller. I did a total of 3 coats of paint (on the front) only 2 on the back, being sure to let the paint dry between coats. I also purchased brushed nickel door pulls at the local hardware store.

Black doors add style

I also considered using chalkboard paint. That way you could actually leave notes for your family, keep an ongoing grocery list, or entertain the little ones while you are cooking. But I decided against it mostly due to that fact that the "dusty" appearance would end up driving me NUTS! It's amazing how much the black doors transformed my kitchen. And they really do stay much cleaner than the white doors ever could!

My last little kitchen quickie arose from a desperate need, a need to have my husband and boys stop asking me "what's for dinner?". Seriously I must get asked the question dozens of times throughout the week. To keep that question off of our daily repertoire I decided to make a menu board that would field that question for me. Initially I had planned on buying a chalkboard, but I had a specific area for it in mind and couldn't really find anything that would fit there. So I made a trip to my favorite craft store and came home with a frame, some stickers, and a variety of scrapbook papers. That's it! The rest is a breeze. I cut the paper to fit the frame and secured it using clear tape. I then used the stickers to spell out "Menu" and the days of the week (in the picture you'll notice I left off Saturday and Sunday, those days the kitchen is CLOSED!) I use a glass marker each week to write in the dinners for the week. VOILA a DIY Menu Board that will keep your conversations off of dinner and on more important things!