I’m in a photo mood tonight. I hope you’re with me.

This is the followup to my Can We Do it For Free project roundup. You may recall how I said then that my projects weren’t 100% done yet.

So here’s where we’re at now:

In my last round of photos, the door trim was primed but not painted, the wall had patched drywall that needed priming and painting, we were dreaming up the transom but hadn’t begun it yet and I was starting the task of covering my cookbooks with varied blue fabrics. Those things are all done now.

We might even be able to move on to an entirely different corner of the house for our next project(s).

The first thing on the agenda was to finish painting the trim and the wall. Prior to all this, the kitchen was white and the trim was a slightly different shade of white. We don’t own paint in the wall-color-white, so we were a little torn about what to do.

We don’t really want a white kitchen in the long run, so we decided we should put some colour on at least this wall rather than buy a colormatched white paint that we don’t want.

There’s a bit of a story about how I was going to try to be frugal and use paint that we already had to mix a colour that would suffice, but I needed more white, and when I went to pick up some cheap, donated, plain white paint at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, I accidentally bought tinted paint that turned out to be exactly the colour I wanted (but had been having difficulty producing in my mixing experiments).

The bottom line is that we got the paint for $6.

After we finished the painting, I finished covering my cookbooks.

I used on-hand fabric scraps (which I had selected prior to our accidentally acquiring this paint colour, so you can see by how well they go together what a ridiculous piece of luck that colour was).

In order for the books to continue to be useful, I needed them to be labeled and for a moment, I actually considered buying myself an alphabet stamp set, reasoning that I would obviously use it for so many things (like what? not sure). But when I started talking about that plan, my mother said that she had such a stamp set. And so this part of the project was done completely with on-hand scraps and borrowed tools.

That crate recipe box, by the way, is another recent project, made with about $1 worth of wood lath and on-hand spraypaint.

We had a red clock on this wall that just doesn’t really go anymore. So it’s down, right now, getting painted white.

Inspired by this lovely chipped vintage kitchen scale, it’s going to be a flat white and will probably be given a bit of scuffing and a yellowed face before it goes back up.

So while I was painting and covering books, Ian was tackling the transom. We bought the glass panes, because we felt it was important for them to be beveled. At about $1.25 per 3×3″ pane, that was about $9.

For the frame, we used only scrap wood that we had on hand.

He mounted the transom window forward in the frame, to be level with the door-face. Which left me the lovely shelf behind it for all my tiny vintage bottles.

Which, really, has turned out to be the crowning glory of this whole project.