Keeping Up With The De Oliveiras: Kitchen Renos

This will be my 100th post... amazing. Can't believe I have blogged so much. Hope you all have been enjoying keeping up with us!

Since it has been too hot to do much outdoors, Carlos has been working indoors on some of the projects we have had on our To Do list. The first one, and for me one of the most pressing, was the kitchen. When we moved in, we hadn't decided on what we wanted to put for our backsplash, and if you remember from THIS blog entry, we had only put up a glass section behind the stovetop. I had been looking for ideas and hadn't found anything that I really liked until two months or so before Alixe was born.

I was inspired by a woman who had bought cream-coloured tiles in the style of the Paris metro. I started looking not long after and found something I thought I liked at a home hardware store... but the closest location is 45 minutes north of here, and I was feeling tired as the pregnancy progressed, so we kept the idea in mind but didn't go check out the tiles right away. After Alixe and I came home, however, the idea resurfaced, and we decided to finally go take a look (we had visited a few other stores in the meantime but none of them had what we wanted).

Right away, we saw that the tiles were what we wanted. I also spotted 60cm-long sections of black glass that I thought would make a nice break from the plain white tiles we picked. And last week, Carlos spent 3 afternoons (plus a small trip back to the store to get extra black pieces, as we decided to tile above the end of the island too) finishing our backsplash. Doesn't it look great?

First few tiles!

Staggering them like in the métro meant more work for
Carlos, but he did it anyway :)

Work in progress

Looks great!

All done!

Here are a few more photos of the girls. We haven't gotten out much (to give you an idea, it is 25°C in the house with air conditioning, and last night it dropped below 30°C after 11pm) but we've still been having fun!