Home: The Kitchen

I've blogged a fair bit about our kitchen previously, but I thought it's time to bring you for a proper tour of the most colourful room in our home today!

When we first moved into our flat almost 10 years ago, we opted to change the cabinetry as those from the previous owner were warping and grimy from all the grease of everyday cooking. However, because we had just started working, we had a really tight budget, and opted to keep the original tiles. This was our kitchen then:

We loved the look of dark wood, and went dark-everything, which wasn't a good idea. The kitchen was long and narrow, and had only one window at one end, so the whole place looked dark and rather gloomy. (Here are some lessons we learnt from our old kitchen.) We then left SG for a year for hubby's overseas attachment, and came home to a roach infested kitchen, simply because our old chute was faulty! So we opted to do an overhaul of the kitchen and toilets, especially since the kitchen drawers were starting to jam, and the toilet tiles were really really old. (If you're interested to find out more about the tiles, you can read this post.)

Anyway, fast-forward to two years after our reno, and our kitchen is looking a whole lot more cheerful. I love cooking in here! The bright yellow backsplash and white counters and cabinetry really help to brighten up this dark room, and the enamel plates also add pops of colour around the kitchen.

I do love enamelware, because it works so hard and is easy to clean! (And they usually come in such happy colours too!) Here's one of my current favourite pots for cooking Baby J's porridge: the Kastrull saucepan. The enamel coating makes washing off burnt-on porridge alot easier compared to regular stainless steel pots.

Ever since the renovations, we've had ample storage space to store things away, so I like to keep my countertop as clear as possible, as I need space to work. I find drawers are a whole lot more efficient in storing stuff compared to shelves, and we store everything away except for the toaster, kettle and Thermomix. (If you look hard, you'll spot our dim sum bamboo baskets. We use these to store garlic and onions!) Hooks above the sink allow easy access to frequently used tools like our scissors and peelers (We use the Fintorp rail and hooks. The hooks are fixed onto the rail, so they won't fall off unlike regular S-hooks, which is a feature I like.)

A clear countertop makes food preparation go a lot faster. :) (These days, we use the Aptitlig chopping boards, which dry really fast and are not as heavy as some of the other wooden chopping boards. And those Elly tea towels are such a steal, and great to use!)



On the other side of the sink is our display wall, and our little breakfast corner.

The display wall is basically filled up with various things that I love: from tingkats (more enamelware!), a painting done by Junior J to postcards that we picked up overseas. (You can read more about the wall here.) The breakfast corner used to be a huge mess of extra Tupperware and random stuff, but now is a nice place for hubby and I to sit down to chat in the mornings, or for the boys to sit and doodle if they wish.

These postcards are framed using Ribba frames... and even our plants are from IKEA!

The breakfast corner holds a jug of water and cups, so that the boys can help themselves to water when they need it. The tingkat holds crayons for doodling, and the Skack serving bowl is perfect for holding fruit. The Barbar tray makes bringing stuff out of the kitchen a lot faster!

We bought these painted kopitiam chairs sometime ago, and I love their vintage and cheerful vibe.

The breakfast corner is also a nice place for a hot cup of tea. (I just had to get this Jamnt cup when I saw it, since we only have one large mug, which the hubby hogs for his tea. This is perfect for my buckwheat tea!)

And yes, our fridge is still plastered with magnets from all over the world. The collection is still growing!

While we had more storage after the renovations, our storage areas were quite a mess with random Tupperware containers and packets of food, and it was hard to find stuff. Recently, I did a clean-out for these areas and got it all sorted using various containers from IKEA. We got our "drinks cupboard" (for a lack of a better term!) sorted using Krus and IKEA 365+ dry food jars:

Some of our frequently used pastas also went into IKEA 365+ jars:

Finally, we shifted all our other dry goods like flour, rice and sugar into Tillsluta dry food jars. These jars seem the most air-tight, and I love how I can fit these neatly into my drawers, compared to the round containers that we used to have.

And just to prettify them up, I used Hemsmak labels for labelling the containers. I think it looks way nicer with the black labels, compared to using torn off bits of washi tape!

PS: You can read about our living room here, and take a tour of our dining room here.

PPS: This post is part of a series of collaborative posts with IKEA. We were given a gift card to purchase some of the aforementioned items in this post, and no monetary compensation was received. All opinions are my own.

Home: The Dining Room

We've been asked to share about our dining rooms and about dining at home this month. When given the prompt, images of pretty table settings came to mind, with neatly ironed napkins, bowls full of steaming soup, a pretty tablecloth and colour-coordinated placemats... and I wondered what I was going to write about, since our meals are anything but pretty. There is only one word to describe mealtimes in our home: Messy. One kid keeps leaving the table and can't sit still, the toddler keeps spitting his food, and wants to self-feed using his hands, another struggles through meals very slowly and manages to get noodles on the table, the chair and the floor. Getting meals to the table on time can be a challenge, so we always keep things simple with unbreakable dinnerware for the kids, and no placemats or tablecloths (here's a peek at some of the meals we have).

While dining at home isn't picture-perfect, I must say our dining room is a rather pleasant place, and it is one of the rooms that works the hardest for us. I've blogged about how our dining table has been through so much. This Stornas extendable table is where we eat all our meals and do our home-learning and art activities. It has heard countless of stories being read aloud, it's surface has been dotted with paint and crayons (until I started using Klack trays during painting sessions, which reduces clean up!), it has hosted parties, dinners and craft sessions. (The posters you see on the walls were purchased from the Copenhagen Zoo, and framed using Ribba frames.)

Watching a Perler bead tutorial and working on his project. The tray really helps to minimize spills and cleanup! 

The dining room also holds the kids' library. This wall used to hold a huge planted aquarium (pictures here), but we decided to give away the fish and sell off the equipment after Junior J came, since maintaining it was a fair bit of work. In it's place stands three Expedit bookcases (these are now replaced by the similar-looking Kallax), and the compartmentalized shelves are great for keeping the books sorted by topics. 

To maximize our storage options, we use baskets and boxes in some of the compartments. These Branas baskets hold building blocks and train tracks, while the Drona boxes hold jigsaw puzzles and games, and these are easily accessible to the kids.

We also use smaller baskets (from Daiso) for some of their very thin books (like their Jolly Phonics readers). Their front-facing arrangement makes it easier for the kids to flip through the books to find the title they want, since the books are too thin to have titles printed on their spines. A Variera shelf insert (in the lower shelf in the picture below) helps to add an extra tier to the shelves, so that we can squeeze more board books in.

The dining room also is the place where our piano stands! We use these small drawers to store various small bits and bobs like mosquito repellant patches, plasters, postage stamps and coins. Since the piano is just next to the main door, we can easily grab these things as we head out the door.

More details on the artwork here, and here. 

We use a Kallax bookshelf as a sideboard too, and the drawers hold some of the boys' homeschool books, as well as dining necessities such as coasters and disposable cutlery. (The traditional basket next to the coffee maker holds our Nespress capsules!)

The dining room is also where we keep our art trolley, which holds some basic art supplies. I've pared down the contents of the trolley since the toddler tends to climb and ransack the trolley these days! It's a Raskog, which many crafters swear by (and hey, it's now going at a reduced price in the new catalogue, so hooray!).

Since the toddler has a bad habit of uncapping markers and throwing them everywhere, we keep all markers out of reach, using enamel cups and a Grundtal magnetic knife rack. This means the older kids can still get the markers, but their younger brother doesn't get to use them unless Mama is around.

This room is so busy that the piles of paper and stuff tends to accumulate here. Having to write this post was great since it made me clear out all the junk, and I'm loving how this room works for us right now!

PS: You can read about our living room here.

PPS: This post is part of a series of collaborative posts with IKEA. We were given a gift card to purchase some of the aforementioned items in this post, and no monetary compensation was received. All opinions are my own.

Home: The Living Room (Before and After)

Hello! Today, I'm popping in to bring you for a tour of our living room. It's really the heart of the home, and is where the boys do most of their playing and doodling, and is often in a whole big mess! It's pretty interesting to see how the living room has changed after almost ten years of living in our home. Here's how it looked like when we first moved in:

Then, we had no kids, and were in love with the look of dark wood. Most of our furniture was deep brown, and in retrospect I think it was a little overwhelming! Since there were no little hands to mess with our stuff, our CDs and DVDs were stuffed helter-skelter in random boxes and stored in our TV bench. 

After the arrival of the kids, we slowly started making changes to the room. First, the toys appeared, so we had to add toy storage, and kid friendly furniture. The boys started ransacking the TV bench, so we felt the need for more storage where we could store our CDs and DVDs out of reach. And after a few years of changing this, and removing this and adding that, here's how our living room looks today, as you enter our home:

Now let me clarify before I bring you for a tour: the living room is not the first room you see when you enter our home. We have an access corridor (which we converted into a learning corner), and upon stepping into home you'll be greeted with our blackboard wall and the dining room. Our layout is unique, because we opted to hack a wall, and sacrifice a bedroom to open up the living-dining area. The initial layout was awkward, and made the living space dark and stuffy, so we felt giving up that bedroom was worth it. So our living room was actually carved out from a bedroom!

We are not fond of built-in furniture, but decided to get wall-mounted Besta units from Ikea as these were cheaper than getting a contractor to build cabinets from scratch. We matched those with more Besta units at the bottom. I admit I went a little nuts, and filled up the rest of the wall space with all sorts of wall art:

Artwork by artist Azisa Noor, whom we commissioned to do three paintings featuring our family in different dreamy landscapes. We printed and framed these in Ribba frames.

Home poster from IKEA (but I think they no longer stock this poster), large globe from a Belgium flea market, small globe from Typo, and wood artwork from Gracesmiths.

The Besta units are fantastic storage! The wall mounted units keep all our DVDs and CDs safe from little itchy fingers. I also store some of the kids' smaller manipulatives out of reach in Glis boxes, which fit perfectly on the narrow shelves. 

The lower Besta units are used to store the kids' toys, while the drawers are used to store their DVDs and CDs, so that they can access them easily. This cupboard is used to store all their building materials:

We hunted around for awhile before finding the perfect boxes for the unit:
Daiso shoe boxes! The boys can easily see what are inside the boxes,
and each shelf can hold exactly 3 boxes. 

We also displayed other artwork that we picked up on our travels (two of my fav buys when overseas: artwork and magnets!), as well as some of the boys' artwork (the wooden letters were decorated by the boys using washi tape). Next to the TV bench is the boys' Duktig play kitchen, which they use almost everyday:

I love how durable the kitchen is. This has withstood many years of play, and has cooked an uncountable number of strange meals. 

We brightened up the kitchen using MT washi tape, as well as a tea towel. 

On the side near the window is our Trofast unit, which holds more toys. 

The lower shelves hold their toy vehicles, while the bins hold Duplo. 

This child-sized typewriter was a vintage one that I scored when we visited the UK.
The cash register is a Duktig one, again from IKEA.

A few years back, Junior J decided to draw on our old sofa with oil pastels, and we never really got the stains out. So two years back, we opted to buy a new Kivik sofa: 

We used to have framed photos taken during our New Zealand honeymoon hanging on the wall over the sofa (you can see the photos here). However, we needed space for a big world map, so we replaced those pictures with this large world map. We had our contractor build a ledge behind the sofa, which we use to hold our library books and current reads:

This set of Svalsta nesting tables is our most recent addition to the room. We used to use a kid's table, but swopped it out for this pair of tables. I love how we can push the smaller table under the larger one when it is not in use, and how it does not have any sharp edges. 

The tables are great for all sorts of activities: building lego, holding tea parties, and drawing monsters and dinosaurs. 

The boys use wooden stools, carved in the shape of different animals.
We picked these up when traveling in Malaysia. 

The smaller table is great since it's slightly lower, so it's the perfect height for baby J!

I love how this room has grown along with our family, and I think this whiter, brighter look suits our home much more. What do you think? 

Whatever the case, I think this room is going to hold plenty of good memories as the years pass! 

PS: This post is part of a series of collaborative posts with IKEA. We were given a gift card to purchase some of the aforementioned items in this post, and no monetary compensation was received. All opinions are my own.