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Day 105- The Perp Returns, We Still Have No Stove, Discovering Perfectionism

I am a pretty old broad. If anyone ever asked me, I would not say I am a perfectionist about anything. But at this late stage of my life, I have found out I am a perfectionist about one thing. Contact Paper.

Now I remember why in recent years I had switched to just laying newspaper for shelf paper. Of course usually there is already contact paper on the shelves that is too much trouble to remove. I wash it down with Pursue disinfectant cleaner from Amway to kill all the germs, and then I just lay newspaper. No stick (so it does move, which is a bummer) but no hassle. Perfect.

The cupboards we're putting in the mobile home either don't have any shelf paper, or they have shelf paper I don't want, so I actually used the real stuff. Contact paper. Problems with that are:
  1. It sticks. You lay it down and if you don't get it right the first time, you have to very carefully lift if up to shift it. At least it's not like the old stuff where once it touches the surface it is stuck as if it were part of what ever you were covering. Once you laid it down, you were stuck with it, or destroyed it and started over. LOL
  2. You may run out before you are done with your kitchen (unless you are a math major). If the contact paper you started with is older, you may not be able to find the same pattern, like what happened with me. 
  3. You mention to a girlfriend how you have to go to the store for contact paper and she offers you 60,000 feet of contact paper that is totally different in color and pattern than you already have. You have to make a decision. Do you go on using her contact paper, or do you use her contact paper and redo everything you've already done hoping you don't run out of that pattern too? 
I found some contact paper that has a backing, but doesn't stick like contact paper, but doesn't move like newspaper, while at the same time it's that easy to lay. The only problem with that is I found it at the dollar store and it costs about a dollar a piece to do a drawer. I'm used to paying $3.99 for yards of the stuff!

I haven't decided what to do yet, but it's looking likely that I'll switch to the pattern my girlfriend gave me. It's green and white which goes with both the brown and the white cabinets, AND, I've seen more of it at the Dollar Store. LOL. That's a win!

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Day 89- Shoestring Budget Rebuilding: A Hodge-Podge in Design

cupboards in original kitchen
When you're rebuilding a kitchen on a shoestring budget, you have to have a little vision. Between having two different and incomplete sets of cupboards, and all the rain we've had ruining a few before we could get them in the house, my vision was becoming a little blurry. LOL.

my hodge-podge of cupboards
I consider myself somewhat of a traditionalist and rather conservative. I'm one of those people that when you're putting things together they should match. Needless to say I was not a happy camper when Tom told me my upper cabinets were going to be the beautiful wood cabinets I love so much, but the bottom cabinets were going to be the white cabinets we had originally found on Craig's List. Due to the rain over the last couple of weeks, the project had been delayed, so in the meantime I have searching Craig's List like crazy to find more wooden cabinets to save me. No luck. As the cabinets are getting attached to the kitchen walls, I'm thinking "man, this kitchen is going to look like just what it is, a hodge-podge of cabinets off of Craig's List". 

As if to tell me what an ungrateful brat I was being, over the last few days I have come across 2 kitchens in other people's homes that were a combination of cupboards just like mine will be, and they actually paid to have them that way! One of my neighbors happened to have her sliding glass door and drapes open that peer right into her kitchen as you pass by. I immediately noticed that she had brown, wood-like cupboards on the top and white cupboards on the bottom.Actually didn't look so bad. Then I went over to another neighbors, and her cupboards were white with wood-like doors, and even this bright blue paint around some of the upper ones. (No, we're not going that far. LOL).

As a final, final, I looked up images of kitchens online. That really made me feel better because I could have actually paid someone for this:
This is another kitchen that has been "designed". It blends the wood and the white. I don't think I would be really big on the red.
So now it turns out that I don't have a "hodge-podge kitchen" built for free from Craig's List. I'm "trendy". LOL. Speaking of which, I better get going putting stuff away, even if I did just receive another turn down for tenancy from the mobile home park owner. 

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