So y'all.
I was really feeling like our kitchen needed some va-va-voom factor. Don't get me wrong, I love our kitchen. It's the biggest kitchen I've ever had the privilege of living with. We were finally able to pull out our vintage china at this house! Prior to Taylor's Wood, our vintage china had sat in a rubbermaid tub for 8 years. The kitchen has lots of great features like solid surface counter tops and hard wood floors. I should be shot just for complaining.
But it's not a complaint, it's just a teensy tiny desire to make the kitchen more snuggly. Who doesn't want their kitchen to be forever smelling like piping hot brewed coffee? Or freshly baked chocolate chip cookies? Kitchens need to be completely cozy.
Maybe you envision a fresh gleaming glass pitcher full of strawberry lemonade? I want my daughter to sit in the middle of the kitchen wrapped in a quilt tasting a blueberry muffin. In our family, many memories are tied to foods. Use your kitchen as the true heart of your home and your children will never forget it. My own mom always had batter to taste on cold Pennsylvania saturdays. Or dad would be on his knees churning the fall batch of sauerkraut in the old crock. The sweet and sour familiar smell, wafting in the air. Us three girls will never forget our long family discussions in the kitchen. Family talk would be held on the vintage wood church pew that resided in the kitchen. Our fat tabby cats laying on the floor, their yellow bellies full of milk.
My loves. A kitchen memory is a forever memory.
The problem is, this particular kitchen is a bit plain. Tan walls, cream cupboards, white doors, white trim. A bit sterile maybe. And I like warmth. Besides all this, Drew and I cook dinner together every night in our home. The only exception are the nights I am at work. And even then, we usually make a snack together at the island and talk and decompress about our day. We truly use our kitchen as the heart.
So I set my brain to a-thinking about what I could do to make her a bit more cozy. More textured. More....something. We thought about Drew adding beams. He wants to try his hand at installing some ceiling accessories anyway. However, we already have crown molding in the kitchen and so we nixed that idea. We thought about painting the cupboards. I've painted many a cupboard in my life and though it's a monstrous task, I was open to the thought. However, I did want something with a bit more "immediate gratification". Y'all know my thoughts on that.
So below is the beautiful ladder pot rack we constructed. And guess what, it's classified as a $50 Friday!!!!
You will need for this project:
Two 2x4x8's
Three 1 inch diameter by 5 ft long dowel rods
1 quart grey pain
1 quart Minwax Early American Stain
Rope
Pack of S hooks (be sure they fit over your dowel rods)
8 Eye Screws
First step. We cut the dowels to the desired width of our ladder. We also cut the 2x4's the desired length of our ladder. Our pot rack is very long because it was going over our island and we wanted some symmetry. Our 2x4's we cut to 6.5ft. Each dowel rod was cut to 18 inches.
We then assembled the ladder.
Drew measured, so as to perfectly screw each dowel rod into both sides of the 2x4's. Be sure your measurements are EXACT or your pot rack will be very crooked.
Here is a shot of us checking to make sure we were happy with the ladder's length up against our island's length. Please excuse our construction mess.
NOW for paint. My favorite! We sanded the whole piece and then I started by very haphazardly smearing the grey paint all over the piece. I didn't cover the ladder, I just smeared randomly.
Please forgive me as I forgot to take a picture of staining the piece. All you do is take a cloth and then stain the ladder as you would stain anything. Wipe stain on, then wipe off. And the stain will adhere to everything. This gives it a very old look and I absolutely love the finish. Again, just stain over the wood and the grey paint, staining the entire piece.
Drew and I then found beams in the kitchen ceiling with our stud censor and set 4 eye screws in place into the ceiling. Directly over our island.
A lot of pot racks use chain but I really didn't care for that look. I loved the idea of rope! So some fun old rope worked perfectly!
Screw the remaining four eye screws into the top of the ladder and then run your rope through. We hung our ladder 10.5 inches from the ceiling because my copper pots hang pretty low. Remember, you don't want to bump your head on the pots while you're working at your island.
Use your "S" hooks to hang all of your pots, pans, baskets, herbs, and cutting boards from your new pot rack.
That's it my loves! $50 Fridays are the BEST!
Love Y'all!!!