Rental Remodel: Cooking Up Change

With life busy as usual, the blog as gotten pushed aside a bit. Sorry!! This weekend I spent a little time reviewing the past couple of months worth of blogs and realized that I completely forgot to update our Rental Remodels! We've been finished with our projects (mas o menos) for a few months now and have happily moved on to new weekend activities! While it's not our dream house decor wise, we feel like we've made dramatic changes that still work with the colonial style of the house and that we're quite happy about!

Stick with us for the rest of the house tour throughout the remainder of January.

Rental Remodel: La Cocina

When we moved into the house, the kitchen looked like this.

Disorganized, boring and really really dirty white, with insufficient above counter storage. The self proclaimed neat freak that I am, I could not stand the open cabinets. They're very typical here in Guatemala, but yuck-O. Who wants to look at all of their crappy cookware? Not me. The second thing that made me crazy was all that white, awkwardly highlighted by harsh florescent lighting.

While visiting Panajachel one day (during the 'rent's visit) my mom and I stumbled up a huge fabric store where we purchased enough material to make curtains to cover up all of that nastiness. Good thing I had previously taken measurements for this very type of purchase!

With a little help from Ben rigging up a cable rod (and lot of patience - his real work came before this fun project for at least 6 weeks), a can of buttery yellow paint (meant for the master bedroom, but then abandoned after realizing how miserable it is to paint bumpy concrete walls), the kitchen miraculously became a place we both actually wanted to be.

TA-DA!

Here's how we did it:
* a little rearranging (the desk shoved up against the wall became our island)
* some inexpensive bamboo placemats to break up the white tile counters
* 1 gallon of paint
* 5 yards of fabric & some heavy duty cable
* a stained piece of wood that stores all our spices & cooking essentials

Cost: less than $70 (including all accessories)
Time: Forever.....this project was a long one, but certainly worth the wait!

We know it is certainly still far from awesome, but with our budget, this is as good as it gets!

* note: since these photos have been taken, the "island" top has been painted a distressed moss green for even more color & style (and to cover up a little hot plate mishap!)