I've Been in the Kitchen.

Since my last post I've pretty much been holed up in the kitchen--but not cooking. There's been very little of that happening lately. I've been painting. Trim, cupboards, baseboards, drawers, walls, doors. Painting, painting, painting. I'm finally done and, as is the case anytime I repaint something desperately in need of repainting, I'm shocked at how much difference just two cans of paint made in this room.

The kitchen was the last room of our house left that we hadn't repainted since moving in eight years ago. And when it was painted back then it was walls and trim only--no cupboards or drawers. I knew the white had dulled over the years but I didn't realize just how much until I painted a fresh coat of white on top and there was a four shade difference. I got lucky this time and only needed to do one coat of white to cover everything, yessss.

A word about our kitchen. It's small. That about sums it up. It has everything we need and we do our best to make it as functional as possible, but it's small. This means paint color and extra stuff matter a whole lot--so we changed both. The old color wasn't bad (buttery yellow) but if I looked at it for one more day I would have gone crazy. I was so tired of it. And there were issues with extra stuff that had taken over that needed to be addressed, so we purged quite a bit of excess. And found smarter ways to store smaller appliances to free up precious countertop real estate, and figured out a pantry solution. 

Our kitchen has this weird area in the back, by the mudroom, that we turned into a makeshift pantry with shelves. The shelves have pretty much been garbage since day 1 when they kept ripping holes into the plaster and bending. And they were ugly. So I made a curtain, hung it from a tension rod, and covered the mess and that's been that since 2006. When we tore out the hold shelves to patch the wall and repaint, the shelves went straight into the garbage and I went straight to Lowe's to find a better solution. Answer? A pantry that just so happened to be the perfect height (this never happens in a 100+ year old house. Never. Everything is some ridiculous custom measurement. ClosetMaid, I thank you many times over).

The trim/cabinet color is Delicate White by Olympic and the wall color is some variation of light gray (also by Olympic, don't remember the actual color name).

On to the next project...

~Stacy