pour améliorer: Tinny Tales

Happy Valentines Day! I realised this morning that this is Tom's and my seventh Valentines Day together! And for the first time, I've told him not to send me flowers. Because really, I'm just not that keen on seeing hundreds of dollars added to our credit bill for the sake of it. Hopefully he finds a simpler, more creative way to show he loves me. Hint hint, honey!

In the meantime, let's get back to this renovation, shall we? Because let's face it, it's the other love of our lives.

Let's move upstairs and have a chat about our kitchen peninsula (otherwise known as a breakfast bar), shall we? Here it is looking from the lounge. And obviously this shot was taken while we still had a back door.

A little unfinished, right? That's just the raw backs of the cupboards and the little MDF plinth we built for it. Probably not the best look if we want this renovation to actually look complete, right?

Right. Well I've dithered (as always) for a long time over whether I should just stick some ordinary VJ boards on the back there and be done with it, or whether I should try to do something a bit more special and interesting to make a feature of it.

I really wanted to go in the interesting direction, but there's a fine line to tread between interesting and off-putting. I didn't want my choice to prevent prospective buyers in the future from wanting to buy the house.

And then one day, I can't remember now what gave me the idea, I decided to google "pressed metal panels", thinking that that might just be my good safe zone between off-putting and boring. And that is how I stumbled across the Heritage Ceilings website. It has pictures upon pictures of tin panels installed in houses, shops, you name it.

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As the name 'Heritage Ceilings' suggests, pressed tin panels have traditionally been used on ceilings.

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But as the pictures testify, there are no laws saying you can't be creative.

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I found examples upon examples of the panels used on the backs of benches...

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And even as kitchen splashbacks!

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In fact, in last year's season of the Australian renovation show 'The Block', Dale and Sophie used pressed tin in the 'Original' pattern as their kitchen splashback.

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I'm proud to say that I actually came up with the idea before seeing them use it, though. So there!

Anyway, the more pictures I looked at, the more convinced I was that I was on the right track.

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And the best part? It's not that expensive! Just in case you can't read this price list from Heritage Ceilings, a 1828mm x 915mm panel (more than enough to cover the back of our kitchen peninsula) costs only $95 (plus GST and delivery).

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I figured that we could even order a second panel and cut it to fit in the gap between the two windows on either side of the kitchen stove, as a splashback.

But deciding on our interesting-enough material to put on the back of the peninsula was only a third of the battle. The next third?

Deciding on the style.

Because there were a lot of patterns to choose from!

We eventually narrowed it down to 'Snowflakes' and 'The Shield'.

We really liked the larger patterned look of 'The Shield', particularly on a big wall like this.

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But because we had a much smaller area to cover, we worried that the larger pattern would be a bit overwhelming. Particularly for the section of splashback above the stove, since just one repeat of the pattern is about 610mm x 610mm, and our splashback would only need to be about 920mm x 700mm, meaning we'd get only one-and-a-bit repeats of the pattern, which could look quite messy.

So, we were down to Snowflake.

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Which I loved the look of over a larger area, but which had a small enough repeat that we thought it could give us a nice (but not overly floral like some of the other patterns) textured look.