It's curtains

...Not in the "something's about to end" sense of the phrase, I mean it's literally curtains that I'm about to talk about here. The giant glass doors in the kitchen have been bugging me, I feel like we need something to dress them a little, we've never had anything over them and once the work in the kitchen is done I think it might be nice to make the doors look a bit less functional and boring, the trouble is they are massive. They could do with replacing really, the seals have gone in some parts and there was an incident with some forgotten keys that means we've got a bit of a hole in the frame but less said about that the better. 

Here's an old picture of the doors, looking in from the garden. They actually look quite narrow there but they aren't really, plus there's a panel of three windows above

Now I don't know if you've bought curtains recently but I have (after the bedroom ones were ruined in the washing machine) and my god are they expensive! I think this is part of the reason we've never really done anything with the doors, to cover them with anything would cost us a fortune, or so we thought. I know I've probably said it before in this blog but I don't really sit well with buying things from Ikea and yes, I've recently bought drawers from there and I've bought curtains and bedding in the not too distant past and so I'm going to sound like a total turncoat here but this is what I'm considering dressing the windows with

Ikea Vivan Curtains £10 (Source)

They're 3 metres long which I think should be just about right for the height of the doors, I'm not 100% if they'd be wide enough to be closed over but I don't even know if that's strictly necessary and anyway at £10 a pair we could easily buy two and stitch them together if need be. 

I'm not sure about the colour of that particular pair, I think it'll look really nice against the pink on the walls but if I paint the dining table turquoise and gold as planned is it going to look awful? What do you think? Also, what do you think of curtains in the kitchen? Necessary or not?

Miraculously, a non-kitchen related post

No really, nothing to do with the kitchen, well nothing except that the current project is cluttering up the kitchen, that is. I digress...

Have you heard of an Ikea hack? They're all over the internet, http://www.ikeahackers.net/. Now, I don't know if I've mentioned before but I'm quite particular about my furniture, a lot of what we own is old, it's either second hand in that it's been passed down to us by relatives or friends or it's been bought from junk shops or charity shops. It's not that we couldn't afford anything new, we just like old things. Anyway, our bedroom furniture is in need of expansion, we've outgrown all our storage and during a painful trip to Ikea one Saturday night (we know how to live) I stumbled across something I thought I could adapt. 

Ikea Rast Chest of Drawers £20.00 (source)

So the plan is that we have one of these each at the side of the bed to use as storage and also as bedside tables, the only problem is they're not the prettiest of pieces and this is where the hack comes in. Armed with some primer, sandpaper, paint and some more interesting handles, I'm hopefully going to transform these units into something an awful lot prettier. I don't hold out much hope for being able to do a very good job with them but I'm going to give it a go. 

Now, I'm off to Pinterest for some inspiration. Check out that link, by the way, there are some really good examples of what you can do with a bit of time and imagination.

Oh, and that skull cushion from my last post? The last one in the shop can now be found on our bed.