Transformation Tuesday: Kitchen Update

Happy Tuesday! And…Happy St. Patrick’s Day. We “celebrated” on Sunday with corned beef, cabbage, and Irish Soda Bread. I may give the kids Lucky Charms for breakfast and call it a day 😉

This is my third Transformation Tuesday post in regards to the updates we’ve done on our house. The first post was about the basement bathroom renovation and then my second post was about our living room/office area.

As I’ve stated previously, if HGTV and Pinterest didn’t exist, I never would have had the “vision” of what our home could be, and I never would have given it at chance.

In my last post, I mentioned how we turned the formal living room into our main living space. Then, we used the dining room for a bit before turning it into an office area. Those rooms connect to the kitchen area.

The previous owners used part of the kitchen space for their kitchen and the other half of the space for their informal living area.

After living in the house for only a few days, we had the room doorways widened. Then, we tackled the floors. Again, I mentioned before that under the carpet in the formal living and dining space, there were unfinished floors. So, we ripped up the carpet in the kitchen and informal living room to find sub floors. We had wood laid, and then stained everything the same stain color.

Before:

The kitchen is big and the cabinets are great quality. Also, the counter tops were a light colored Corian material, and we were pleased with them. What were we not so pleased with? Uh…the carpet in the kitchen! To be fair, the carpet was immaculate. An older couple had lived in the house before us…but carpet with four-year-old twins was not a good combo upon moving in! I also didn’t love the fact there was a ceiling fan so close to where I’d be cooking. We actually moved the ceiling fan to our living room! Win win.

After:

The island with built in shelves was always a dream of mine. I loved picking out the granite (sticking with my color scheme of gray!), and the kids eat breakfast at the island every morning. We don’t have a pantry, but we do have tons of cabinet space, so we are lucky in that regard. The oven was the first appliance we swapped out…but only after it went kaput after living here about a year. Then, we needed more room in the fridge, so we purchased that next after about two years. The dishwasher and microwave are high quality, so we’ve left them as is for now, but will probably get new ones at some point. I also dream of a new sink and gas stove. I’m hoping to cross those things off the list sometime in the near future.

We also added recessed lighting throughout the kitchen. The only light that was in that entire space was the light from the ceiling fan at each end of the room and some under cabinet lighting.

Before:

After:

Travis painted the paneling white as a quick fix. Then, he used Pavilion Beige on the walls which is what we painted our walls in our former house before putting it up for sale. Also, there’s the cut out that looks into the living room.

Right when the kids started kindergarten, I put up the fishing line and clothes pins for them to hang their favorite school work. It’s so weird to think there’s only about one more year of elementary work to hang up on my Pinterest project!

The view from the kitchen into the office space. I love the light fixture in the office. There was a chandelier there when we used that space as a dining room.

Cabinets and Back splash Updates:

I like to make things as pretty as possible as soon as possible. One thing I was very proud of is that we lived in the house awhile before making some decisions. We’d lived in our house about a year before we decided to paint the cabinets. I debated between a gray or white for the cabinets. At the time, the back splash was an off white tile. While I knew we’d change it at some point, I just didn’t know when. Also, with the white paneling, I was afraid the whites wouldn’t match or it would be too much white. So, we went with a gray color. After much debate, (why are grays so difficult?!), we chose Sherwin Williams Light French Gray.

This picture of before and after popped up on my Facebook memories recently. What perfect timing! You can see the colors we were thinking about in the cabinets on the left.

Two men painted the cabinets in a few days, so it was a pretty painless process (after we got the paint color chosen! 😉 Then, of course, we needed new drawer pulls and knobs. (Knobs aren’t on yet in the “after” photo.)

I think about six months after we got the cabinets painted, we had the back splash updated. Our neighbor installed it for us and was tedious with choosing tiles that would be a good combo of colors. Not too many white tiles vs. too many gray tiles! Balance.

Before

Again, the owners before us, used this space as their informal living room. It’s where we put our farmhouse table when we had it built.

After:

There was a heavy sliding glass door that leads out to the sun room. Another one of the first changes we made was getting French doors which made a pretty dramatic difference for this area of the house

Fireplace Before:

The fire place as another part of the house we “lived with” for awhile. We weren’t sure if we should paint it or not. After living here about a year, Travis painted it as we thought it would lighten up the kitchen even more. We’d heard that painting brick can be difficult and take multiple coats, but he didn’t have any issues and had the project completed quickly.

Fireplace After:

We get a lot of great natural light coming in from the sun room, and adding the gray paint made this area even lighter.

Still the kitchen, but another angle. The previous owners had a built in shelf for their television at this end of the kitchen.

Also, we had a gallery wall in the living room of our previous home, so I added some of my favorite pictures to this wall within a few months of us moving in.

I like the mix of modern furniture with antiques in this space. The cabinet on the left is a family heirloom that my dad gave to me. We added it to our kitchen about a year ago after I visited KC and then rented a small U-Haul to bring it back.

We purchased the accent cabinet from Ashley furniture a couple of years ago when there was a sale going on. I’d never had a place to showcase the China we got as a wedding gift (and never use ;). I also use that space to safely house some of the kids’ pottery projects throughout the years.

I really do love that we are able to utilize all the space in our house. In our old house, even now with two kids, I know we still would have wasted space. Of course, sometimes I wish we had bigger bedrooms and bigger closets, but the main living areas have been pretty perfect for us. It’s been fun scratch my creative itch and make decisions a long the way for our home.

I continue to be thankful that Travis found this house and pestered me until we went to look at it 😉 Plus, if you haven’t noticed, Travis likes to tackle projects…especially those that have to do with painting!

I hope you are having a great week. Thanks for reading, y’all.