It's the little things

There are roughly a zillion things I love about our new house. But to narrow it down a bit, today we will focus on sinks.

The kitchen sink is the center of attention here. It has two basins: one is deep and wide, enough to get my biggest pan in there for serious scrubbing. The other basin, which contains the disposal, is shallower, but not so shallow that it overflows nasty disposal gunk onto the coutertop when the dishwasher runs, like the disposal-sink at a certain house we won't mention.

Then there's the utterly mundane-seeming garage sink. A sink... in the garage. What a concept. I've never had one of these before, but it is so logical, you want to smack your forehead with your palm. Of course, when you are in the garage, and working on some garden task or other garagey chore, you would want to wash your hands!

(In our McGarvey house I wanted to put in a garage sink, mostly to create a dark room. The contractor that came out estimated the work to be in the thousands. That never happened, obviously. I don't know that a dark room is in the cards at this house, partly because there's a skylight almost directly above the garage sink.)

Stencil!

If anyone remembers the colorful walls in our old house, you'll understand how excrutiatingly bored I am with our current white walls (which are also textured to death and therefor way too hard to paint, especially since this house will probably get torn down some time in the next year or two!).

So since I can't paint walls, I'm painting furniture.

I've had this dresser for about 13 years. Who knew I'd still have it now after buying it at Meijer in Champaign and putting it together with Nathan in my apartment there?

It's not the world's ugliest dresser, but some sprucing up sure couldn't hurt it.

The blogoshpere is abuzz with the stenciling trend, so I decided to try it out on this small scale. Here's the initial attempt:

Not perfect by any means, but not bad. The fact that the stencil hangs off the drawer makes it bow and therefor there's space for bleed. I bought a can of repositionable adhesive for the next round. I also decided I'm not madly in love with this result, so I'm going to try white-on-turquoise next instead of the other way around. We'll see how it goes.

Now, the next big question: What kind of hardware? Any thoughts on what goes with Moroccan window pattern in turquoise?