A Little Kitchen Change

For the past few years I've wanted to repaint all the yellow walls we've had since we added on our new kitchen in 2004. 

Maybe because I've seen so many pretty white kitchens on blogs? Sometimes seeing a different kitchen decor means wanting it, whether or not we need it.

And the bright colors I chose for our rooms in 2004 seemed....out, passe, not in style.

Especially the yellow walls, the bright yellow rain slicker walls I chose for the kitchen areas back in 2004, when this yellow was in House Beautiful.

  And let's don't even talk about the black granite counter tops we had installed in 2004, which almost instantly became an anathema to designers. And ours weren't even honed.

Honed?  Nobody told me about honed.

So there I've been, with yellow walls I wished were white. Lots of yellow walls--kitchen, family room and dining area, pantry area, and in the old kitchen ell, everywhere we had installed the black and white checkerboard floor that I had wanted for decades ever since I saw Dee Hardie's kitchen on the cover of House Beautiful. 

And speaking of the black and white checkerboard floors, guess who it was that insisted we use white grout, not black? That would be me. And guess what color white grout turns to with years of use by pets, muddy boots, and sloppy cooks? 

Back to the yellow walls being painted white. It just was not going to happen. My men would rather work outside in 100 degree temperature than paint lots of yellow walls white.

So I studied on it for ages, looking through Pinterest for hours....

because I decided I needed to embrace my yellow walls.

And I found one magical picture, and no, I'm not going to show it to you because my kitchen would look like Cinderella before the glass slipper next to it.

But it gave me the idea of painting only the lower cabinets of our kitchen, not the walls, not the upper cabinets, surely no more than two days work. My men agreed to that.

Here's the kitchen a year ago with the yellow walls, black granite, and stark white cabinets:

The problem of that, in my eyes, is that the kitchen is open to the family room, and the family room is anything but stark white, as you can see. 

So R.H. and two of our sons painted the lower kitchen cabinets, making me one happy lady.

The color I chose was a grayish green, Benjamin Moore Oilcloth.

No, that's not a true picture of it, this is more like it:

Actually, it depends on the light, day, night, sun, cloudy. It changes.

It does make the biggest difference to me, more like the lower cabinets are a piece of furniture, not white kitchen cabinets sitting right beside a colorful family room.

I think my decor philosophy from now on is going to be this, from designer Tom Scheerer:

"Don't make too much trouble for yourself.

Work with what you have and get on with it.

Live life now,

rather than after a torturous renovation."

Tom Scheerer

 

Now I have another problem. I can't get PicMonkey to work, even after following their instructions to update flash player. So what will it look like if I load remaining pictures without editing them? These would have been in collages so you wouldn't have to scroll through so many pictures. And there's no editing on the rest of these or some of the above ones. 

But I went to so much trouble to do this post that I'm including them for those of you who have told me you want to see more of our kitchen, even though this is a long post and I'm been trying to make my posts much shorter lately.

You can't really see the beautiful granite lazy susan that our daughter gave us, but this is where I keep all my vinegars, olive oils, and some seasonings, right by the stove.

Once upon a time I had a regular size refrigerator that sat in its own little nook, where the china cabinet now sits. When we replaced it, I wanted a big one, easy to reach into without becoming a human pretzel, and sacrificed form for function. I'm willing for it to stick out.

Behind these doors is the pantry.

(And that area, my friends, is where my sink, fridge, and oven sat for 14 years

before we added on the new kitchen.)

Any blogger who takes pictures of her kitchen to post when her Swifter broke down

when she planned on taking pictures of her kitchen floors

might as well go ahead and show a picture of her far from styled pantry.

 

 So that's it, our kitchen.

You saw the kitchen ell in my recent post on pomanders,

where a wall of old cupboards sit that hold dishes,

so that's about it, dear friends.

We have a strange kitchen.

It wanders around.

It takes 18 steps from our sink to a trashcan.

Refrigerators stick out,

the sectional sofa that holds our large family is almost a part of the kitchen,

the grout is dingy, 

the microwave, food processor and toaster are banished to the laundry room,

but I feel like I'm in love with my kitchen of many colors once more.

Even if Benjamin Moore did just announce that their color of the year for 2017

is going to be something or other white.

I'm happy but I can't promise that I won't fall in love 

with the next pretty kitchen in Blog Heaven.

Of course, none of you ever do that...do you?