Lightening Up The Kitchen

When we bought our new house we inherited a  fugly kitchen.  From day one I started thinking of some inexpensive, quick fixes we could do to make it more our style until we could afford a major remodel.

The kitchen walls were painted a dark blue, and the cabinets are white on top and black on the bottom.  They are painted in flat finish and they were not primed, you know what that means, right?  When you try to clean them the paint comes off and all the dirt, oil and wine splatters are absorbed into the flat finish, leaving dingy splotches everywhere.  Even the ceiling is painted in flat white and it has wine splatters on it.  I know what you are thinking, how on earth does one get wine up on the ceiling?  It's irrelevant!

Before

 The appliances were beige and the fridge had "faux" wooden door handle. The kitchen also came with a "fabulous" faux brick back splash and an even more "fabulous" faux butcher block counter top, It's "fauxbulicious"!  I can go on and on about the negatives but let's just focus on the things that have improved since we've moved in.

Before

The first thing we tackled was to paint the walls in Behr's Irish Mist.  I had the paint matched to Glidden's premium paint and primer to save money and I used semi gloss finish to make it easy to wipe clean.  Then we replaced the appliances with our own stainless steel appliances.  We haven't changed the dishwasher yet because I have never used a dishwasher in my life, so I have no idea if I even want a new one or just add storage in it's place.

 We also switched out the overhead light fixture for this Allen + Roth ORB flushmount from Lowes.  It looks ten times better than the small, white, boob light that was there before.

Next up, I changed the white vinyl mini blinds for a nice, textured, woven shade from Home depot.  It looks like they don't carry the same ones anymore the closet match I could find was this one, Radiance Cocoa Havana bamboo roman shade.

With white vinyl mini blind

The nice, woven, textured shades

Lastly I painted the faux brick in the same paint as the walls.  Now the kitchen feels lighter and brighter and I don't hate the brick as much as I used to.

Below are some of the other things we would like to do to the kitchen in this for now phase

• Prime and paint the trim and ceiling semi gloss white.
• Sand and repaint the cabinets, the paint job was done very poorly.
• Change out the hardware on the cabinets.
• Replace the hanging light fixture over the sink with something more our style.
• Do something about the wasted space over the refrigerator.

There are a lot of other little improvements we are letting simmer before we make any decisions because we don't want to spend a lot of money on temporary fixes.  The short list above will help us get by until we save up for a major overhaul.  Sometimes taking your time before doing any extreme changes is better in the end.  This way we can get a feel for how we use the space, what works, what doesn't and what can use some improvements.  The kitchen already feels so much better with just the simple, quick fixes we've done so far.

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