A Tale of A Kitchen

When we bought this house, our kitchen was a lovely shade of country blue and tan wallpaper. Ohmygoodness I wish I had a photo to show you but let me assure you, it was not pretty. Needless to say that was one of the first rooms that we repainted. We spent hours tearing that stuff off of the walls and then brightened the room up with some yellow paint. I loved my yellow kitchen and the red back door. My mom sewed some cheery tulip curtains for me and they were perfect. The room was yellow for seven years.

Last month I decided it was time to change again. I had new dishes and I wanted to use them as a catalyst to get myself a whole new room. I chose some paint and got to work. Now let me just note that we were having a dinner party at our house on a Saturday night. What would a crazy pregnant lady like me decide to do? How about paint the kitchen on Thursday! So I did. I also had a whole list of projects for Nate to take care of like hanging curtains and installing a new light fixture and hanging up my pottery-barn-knock-off-message-center thingy. We worked our ever-loving butts off and got it all done just in the nick of time. Without killing each other. Here are some photos of the finished room. My flash really distorted the colors. The walls truely are blue, not the washed out white that shows up here. The bulletin board really does go with the dishes, I promise. Just trust me. So here is a quick tour.

This is the pottery-barn-knock-off-message-center thingy. I saw it in their catalog but didn't want to pay a couple hundred dollars for it, so I hit the lumber yard. I picked up some cork board, some peg board, and some masonite . I painted the pegboard red and the masonite with black chalkboard paint and then made Nate hang it all up. Like I said, the flash killed my wall color in this photo. Picture "Heavenly Breeze" blue.

This is me winging a window treatment. I picked up the curtain at Target with my fingers crossed that it would match. It did. Hooray! Then I needed something to hang on the three hooks that have been above the window since forever ago when I had actual plants hanging there. I decided to make a little craft and hung these letters. It' helps to remind the kids why we are all sitting around the table every night. And again, the color is all wrong. The blue in the frames is not near that dark and the wall is not so bleh.

Now when you see this picture you might think "what the heck?" But this is just me being a dork with my camera. For the first week or so after I finished the kitchen, I would come up the stairs from doing laundry or surfing the internet and I would get a glimpse of the room and remember "Oh yeah! That's right, I re-did the kitchen!" And I just loved it with the light fixture and the flowers and the paint color. So I took a picture. This photo is a whole lot more true to the colors in the room. That would be because I ditched the flash.
So there you have it. My kitchen is new. Well, except for the gold linoleum floor that we have been intending to replace for, let's see, seven years now. In fact when we painted the kitchen yellow, we pulled off all of the baseboards and didn't put them back up because why put them back up when you are going to get a new floor?.......seven years later. And there's also the non-wood super dark nasty cupboards but I don't want to talk about that.