main kitchen pendants

I am slowly going mad trying to find the right lighting for the house.  I think I've easily browsed 5,000 lights...probably more.  I have also gone to lighting stores to see options.  Out of all the finishes and design decisions, this is probably the one I like the least.  I have, though, enjoyed using Pinterest to keep track of possibilities. Gathering the top picks in one location that also keeps track of the webpage I found them on is really invaluable.  Another tool is Photoshop.  I needed a break from selecting the apartment fixtures, so I looked at our top 3 fixtures for our pendant lights in our main kitchen.  I used a screen grab of the model as the base, but one could also use a photo of the actual space.  Then I just added images of the different lights that I had grabbed from the internet.  The first image is top contender right now.

Click here to go directly to my Pinterest light fixture board.

finished hardwood floors

Our floors are finished! We looked at going even darker, but this is a little darker than we have in our current home which we have really liked.  It grounds the room.  It will be a nice base for the cabinets, bookcases and eventually furniture.  Interestingly this picture above shows how the primer on the walls is picking up a slight pink tone...not as much in the next photo.  This is coming into play when we are choosing paint color....that's a future post.

The floors are 5" white oak rift and quarter sawn character grade.  This above photo shows the life of the wood.  The sealer after the stain was Bona DTS and the finish top coat was Bona Traffic.  While the stain was solvent based, Duraseal quick coat, the sealer and finish coat were both low VOC with the Greenguard seal of approval for indoor air quality.

 Choosing the right color and darkness was a process.  We worked with Andy Mills of Genesee Woodworking on the Karina house and after he installed and sanded the floors we started to look at the stain.  First they applied a black tint to the floor which is the middle lightest color below.  This evened out some of the contrasting tones of the boards. The color to the right of that is another layer of tint...but we stuck with just one.  Then he applied 3 different stains.  We liked the one all the way to the left called coffee.

 Next he tinted a larger board and applied the stain we liked and then we took it up to see it in the space.  I thought it was just a tad too dark and we were loosing some of the grain character.  So he made up another board and we went with that.