The Kitchen..(room by room)

Since my last post was about goodies I had for my kitchen, I might as well start the room by room tour of my home.. You got to see the living room now, let's move on the second best place in the house- The Kitchen!!!

When we moved in, there were a couple of things that we had to live with in the kitchen. First of all, the Hubby and I are not big fans of the maple cabinets. (Oh well, they were new when we bought the house.) and we HATE the tile the previous owner picked out. It's a tumbled pinkish Mexican tile.

Yes it's neutral but when you think of 1953 ( the year the house was built- you DON'T think Mexican tile) I have to say to her credit, the previous owner did take fantastic care of the house. When we bought it, it was newly renovated. She actually lived here for a while with her family. She didn't just flip the house, add a bunch of Home Depot crap to it and go off and sell it- You can tell that she really loved living here and took the time to pick out what she thought was" nice".

NICE to her.. Not so nice to us.

I've learned to live with the tile- I don't really obsess about it too much but what I couldn't stand was the random "basket o' plenty" fruit tiles on the back splash. our back splash is pretty standard- White tile. I guess to add "interest" she put these random tiles in. We have so many cool things on our counter , we really didn't mind the white tile as a backdrop to our colorful collection of kitchen stuff- Here's a pic of when she lived here and we did the walk through ( Notice the arrows and that hideous random tile I'm talking about)

We had to come up with a solution to hide those ugly tiles.. so I came up with these.

I am a HUGE fan of SHAG and it was a perfect opportunity to infuse him into the home. I made these tiles by priming white tiles ( You need to do this so the oil based paint will stick to the tile) I bought a bunch of Shag decals. The cool thing about these decals is that they are clear so the color shows with through. I thought they turned out pretty good.

I was only limited to the stickers that had in those sizes. I have since learned that you can get the same effect with using something called water slide decal paper. If you use that.. you can pretty much do whatever design you want- even real photos since you print them right off from your home computer.

After the decal is on the tile, you have to make sure you put the clear sealant on the sucker or else it could possibly peel. I get them wet all the time and I clean my back splash with Mr. Clean and Fantastic- I haven't had a problem at all!

Here's what it looks like on the white back splash with all my colorful kitchen stuff-