We've made some improvements in the kitchen that I haven't shared & didn't document very well, but I've got to share anyway because I think you'll be just as impressed as I was with the power of paint!
(Warning: bad picture quality ahead! I didn't plan on blogging & I don't have a fancy camera anyway. You'll have to deal with iphone pics for a while...sorry! AND this turned out much longer than I thought it would.)
This was our kitchen when we bought the house. Yeah. It gave me nightmares. The combination of the bright red walls, orangish tinted cabinets, and a tile floor patterned to look like linoleum (seriously, why would someone do that?!) made me physically angry. I could feel my blood pressure rise just standing in that room. It was turrible (that's a word)!
Check out those floors! (Get it? 'Check' out...) I wanted desperately to tear out those floors and put in a gorgeous natural stone or even a cork floor, BUT time & money were too short. And Bill liked the floors...and they were really well laid...and they were in perfect condition...and they were laid under the cabinets so we would've had to pull the cabinets and counter tops out to put down something new. So they stayed.
Obviously, the first thing I did was paint. Can you say 'WOW'! Paint made a HUGE difference!! It lightened up and neutralized the whole room. Even the floors were less intrusive. (Ignore that piece of wood across the wall. I didn't take pics after painting so this is actually the pic from the beginning of the next project shown in the next pic.)
We tried forever to decide what to do with that long, blank, awkward wall. We thought of putting some type of seating area there, but it was going to take up a lot of space to fit only a couple of people. We considered trying to match the cabinetry and put in more cabinet & counter space, which would have been awesome for extra storage & surface area, but cabinets are expensive and I thought it would probably be hard to match them and I knew that ultimately I wanted to re-do the entire kitchen. The lay out of the room could definitely use some improvement and nothing in there was really my style, but it functioned just fine so it had to stay for the time being.
We decided to put long shelves across the whole wall and a wider, counter hight 'shelf' at the bottom. This addressed both the need for extra storage space and additional work surface area. So, I started looking around the internet for shelving inspiration!
I started with just Google searching 'kitchen shelving' in images. Then, I started checking out places like Ikea online and some of my favorite stores to see what type of shelving they used for their inspiration photos & idea books. Then, I started stalking some of my favorite blogs...which of course is where I should have started to begin with! Everybody knows that blogs are the best place for cute & functional ideas with helpful tips & how-to's! That's when I saw this on one of my favorite blogs, Young House Love. (If you've never checked them out, you should do that immediately after reading this post!) The process and instructions for how to make these shelves spans a few different posts on their blog, but they are super helpful & gave me all the info I needed to make some of my own!
So, my pics are clearly lacking, but this is the beginning of getting our shelves up. We taped off all of the studs to see where the brackets should go. We opted to use 3 brackets per shelf to make them sturdy and as centered as the wall studs would allow them to be.
They're not perfectly centered as you can see in the pic below, but it was more important that they be sturdy (to Bill) and you actually can't tell at all in real life unless you are standing directly across from them and notice the light fixture is not lined up with the middle bracket. [Side note: I hate that light fixture and we planned to change it to a super cute fixture that fits close to the ceiling, but when we tried to change it we found that the 'box' for it was IN the ceiling...as in, they sheetrocked OVER it & we'd have to cut open the ceiling to get to it, so it had to stay.]
Once all the shelves were in place, I took them down and put 2 coats of Stain on them and 2 coats of polyurathane on the shelves and brackets and 4 coats of polyurethane on the 'counter' since it was going to get so much use.
And here they are all done and back up! I tried my best to match the stain color to the cabinet color. I probably would have prefered to paint them, but there was not a color that looked ok with the cabinets and the floors. It would've been awkward to use any other color I think. Now that they're done, I love them! We use them a million times a day and I think they were the perfect solution for that weird wall!
Also, notice that I painted that one wall behind the shelves to make them 'pop'. You can sort of see in the pic above (2 pics up) that everything kind of blended together. It was much more noticeable in person that the cabinets, shelves, wall color, counters, and even the fridge were all almost the same color. I started to feel like I was in an asylum! (I probably belong in one, but you know...) It drove me crazy, so one day I pulled everything off the wall again and painted that bad boy! It didn't take long to get 2 coats of that rich chocolate color on the wall and it makes me feel much better about the room. I wish the pics were better...sorry! I'm trying to get better at blogging...hang in there with me...I'll get there!
So, what do you think of our kitchen improvement? Have you done anything like this in your home? Where do you go for inspiration? Tell me what you're up to!
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