No Pattern Required

So, I was digging through all of pamphlets and instructional manuals the former owner of our house had left behind for us and looking for the directions on how to operate the record player in the basement.  Seriously. I remember using a record player when I was little, but the model that is hooked up in the basement goes far beyond a simple record player. 

In any case, not only did I find the instructions for the record player, but a ton of other interesting instruction manuals as well. Including the original installation instructions that came with our blue Geneva kitchen cabinets.  I need to do a bunch of scanning before I upload the others, but here is the cabinet instructions. Enjoy!

I ADORE this post from Sara!  I am dying over that fridge!

But first……… I had to show y’all this bomb-a-licious GE kitchen that is up for sale on E-Bay right now. Click HERE for the link. The guy is asking $7000 for the whole kitchen, which I think is insanely high, and is probably the reason no one has even attempted to make an offer yet (though it seems people are interested if you read through the Q&A at the bottom). The kitchen is TOTALLY, FANTASTICALLY awesome though, it even still has the original fridge!

Is this Refrigerator not the coolest thing EVER! Pink with a Turquoise Interior! Ruth, Sable get your smelling salts! And, check out the swing out shelves. I think I have died and gone to retro heaven!!! This kitchen looks pristine.  Very, very time-capsuley! You would think that Fridge was just delivered, it looks SO clean.

In the auction the guy says his house was built in 1956 and this kitchen is original to the house. Oh man, I wish he would keep that kitchen as it is. If the kitchen is this cool I cannot imagine what the rest of the house looks like – or what they are doing to it.   *Feeling a little depressed now*

OK! Pulling self out of depression at thoughts of awesome 50′s house probably getting gutted and renovated “Home Depot” style, and on with the rest of the post!

All right kids, raise your hands if you know what sycophant means. I’m waiting…… OK, I had absolutely no idea either. So here goes,  Sycophant - n.  A servile self-seeker who attempts to win favor by flattering influential people. Now, you are probably wondering why I would get all class-roomy on y’all today and it is for only one reason – my love of Mad Men and Sesame Street! I don’t know if anyone has seen this yet but if you dig Mad Men you HAVE, HAVE, HAVE to check this link out. Sesame Street did an awesome parody of Mad Men, like only they can do.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgvKCfZqxrQ&feature=player_embedded

Don’t you love how they just slip in a word like sycophants at the end, and it is perfect too. It reminds me of just how awesome Sesame Street really is! If I ever win the lottery I am definitely donating some big $$$ to PBS!

Oh…check out this eye candy!  Reader Sara from AZ emailed me this great link to a set of slideshows on MSN that have a kitchen showcase for every decade from 1950-2000!  They are just fantastic, especially the 1950′s and 1960′s kitchens. 

Sara said her favorite was the pink kitchen in the 1950′s section, but I think this turquoise kitchen is my favorite, especially the appliances and the great tile details.  We need a new fridge, and I love the one in this kitchen. Which one (or all) of the kitchens do you love?  Check out all the photos with the great detailed captions.

Hello everyone!  I hope you had a great holiday weekend.  Hubs and I fired up the grill and did a lot of entertaining this weekend.  It was really the first time that all of the people we had over weren’t close friends, so that meant a lot of cleaning and a lot of tours of the house!  The most common comment was “this is a huge house”, and I was disappointed by the lack of enthusiasim for the retro decor!   Ah well…there is no accounting for taste.

Speaking of houses, I received a few emails over the weekend from Jan aka Sablemable of some mid-century houses for sale in her neighborhood.  If anyone else wants to send me a link for a great retro home for sale around them, feel free and I will try and work it into the posting rotation.

Here is the link for this super cute house.  The asking price for this baby is $125,900. I have to admit – it has a bit too much wood paneling to be my house, but I totally think it is cute.

I love the front. That angled roof is awesome.

Cute kitchen.  A few details would restore this kitchen to its retro-glory.

Check out the light fixtures and the wallpaper!

Love the teal countertop!

So, head over to the site and check out all the pictures of this great house.  And stayed tuned for more great houses from Sablemable and from my neck of the woods!

Ugh. It is snowing outside.  I knew it was going to snow today, because Hubs had been repeating the forcast every hour yesterday, hanging his head and sighing every time. But I didn’t know it was going to snow so much!  I thought it was supposed to be less than an inch! Less!  It looks like at least an inch has fallen already, and it just keeps snowing. Ah well. I guess I will stay inside and work all day. I really need to organize my office anyway….

In the meantime, here are some pictures of the touch up paint that goes with my kitchen cabinets.  It is Quick Drying DupliColor for cars.  I found it during the initial scrub down of the cabinets before we moved in.  It is, of course, dry as a bone and completely unusable. But it is nice to have an actual color name to go with the cabinets and to know that I have a little something to slip into my purse and carry around with me to try and match up colors, rather than trying to guess or to go off a photograph.  Plus the bottle is adorable.

Here it is: 1958 Ford Blue. Azure Blue, to be more specific. And the bottle was used on the cabinets. A lot, actually. The people who owned our house before us were very militant about keeping everything in good repair. Which is fantastic, because now we have a house in really good condition.  I wish I could still get this exact paint in this exact color, because I can see a couple places that need a touch-up. And using this paint, even though the touch-ups are old, if you aren’t leaning *thisclose*, you can’t even tell a repair was made.  Ah well, I will have to make due. I know they have those color-matching paint systems now, so maybe I can get this color digitally matched in the future.

Otherwise, does anyone else out there have a great color story?  Feel free to share anything about paint, painting or matching colors for your home.

Or let me know how the weather is by you! I want to get out of this winter wonderland and hear about some sun and fun…

When we had the floor put in, we moved everything movable out of the kitchen and onto our three season porch.  This included the fridge and the cabinet next to the fridge, which had been displaced from its original spot in the kitchen design during the one and only “remodel” of our kitchen back in 1986.  That remodel consisted of replacing the countertops and appliances, leading to the displacement of this large cabinet to make room for a new fridge.

After the floor went in, we decided to leave this cabinet out on the three season porch for a while. Moving it out of the kitchen had left an empty spot between the fridge and the stove area, making it possible to have larger garbage and recycling  cans only a toss away from the prep area and the dishwasher. We had thought to leave the extra cabinet on the porch for game and summer storage. 

But then my cookbooks overflowed their designated area, and we had to move the cabinet back in to the house.  

Not that I am complaining.  I think the new placement of the cabinet is great.  We put it along the empty wall in the eat-in area of the kitchen.  I was trying to figure out what to put there, if we needed to get another piece of furniture or not, but the cabinet looks pretty good for right now.

Which is a good thing, because otherwise I would have been running around trying to match either the blue of the cabinets, or our natural maple wood accents, neither of which is a fun thing to do.

I also got to pull out another of my vintage linens, which we use far too few of, in my opinion.  This pretty one was made by my great aunt. It has seen some better days, but I just put the stained and unraveled parts toward the wall. Shh…don’t tell….

And the best part of this cabinet?  The vintage shelf paper, with a scalloped edge, still lining the metal shelves.

Ahhh…happiness….