HOME RENO – THE HOME STRETCH

Now that all the construction had been done and the plasterers had been in and done their thing we were ready to paint. Believe it or not choosing the paint colours was the hardest decision in the whole reno project! I am not the most decisive person to begin with, I have trouble deciding what to eat at a restaurant so choosing paint that would be on my walls for quite a while was a daunting task.

I knew what I wanted in my head, but finding the right colour that looked right when on the walls was a different story. I wanted white and fresh, but as the house is north facing and very bright I wanted to choose a cool white and not a warm white. There are SOOOOO many shades of white!! I found most of them looked too blue or purple once on the walls.

In the end we tossed up between Resene’s Karen Walker Wan White or Resene’s Sea Fog.

We decided on the sea fog as it was a slightly cooler tone with a hint of grey to it which complemented Resene’s Alabaster beautifully which we had decided on for our skirtings, cornices and doors.

All painted!

Now it really starts to take shape. We spent a day and night putting together our flat pack kitchen and getting it all in place ready for the bench top people to come and measure and fit our top.

And the in went the bench top! WOW it looked stunning. I was in love and it was still nowhere near complete!

It was fresh, bright, crisp and modern and even though the kitchen wasn’t that much bigger than the original, it seemed like it was double the size.

As our dining area was quite small and now with the doors we didn’t want to have a large dining table plonked in the middle of that space we incorporated a bench into our kitchen design for Kylan to sit at and eat breaky, and to help open up the space into the lounge. It looked amazing!

I wanted to include something a little special into our entrance way. As the rest of the newly renovated house was very simple and clean I wanted to add a subtle bit of detail to the entrance. After spending hours scraping wallpaper and lots of money skim coating all our walls adding a feature wallpaper was out of the question!

I jumped on Pinterest for some inspiration and discovered stencils for painting patterns. I couldn’t find any stencils at our local shops so I decided to make my own. I simply found a design I liked, had it printed and transferred to a plastic sheet and cut it out. I then taped it to the wall and painted over it. The result was pretty good if you ask me. As you can see its nowhere near perfect. But the overall look and effect is beautiful. It is subtle enough that it doesn’t knock you off your feel when you open the door but just enough detail to make our visitors say WOW!

the stencilling process nearly complete

You can see the imperfections up close, but its still amazing