Last week on
twitter I mentioned that I was considering showing photos of our kitchen. I started to write the post and then I chickened out! The kitchen's still very much in progress but, after thinking about it a bit (and after a little tweet from
Lynn), I realized I was being absolutely ridiculous. As I've said before, there are always going to be varying opinions about the way a house is decorated, but at the end of the day, this is what works best for our family. We've lived here less than 4 months and it's come a long way from the hot flipping mess we started with (above). Below is what 1/2 of our kitchen looked like yesterday. Full disclosure: there's usually a sink full of dirty dishes and the crockpot isn't usually on the counter:
PRH and I refinished the
floors throughout the entire house. The kitchen and dining room are really just one big room, which is more obvious in
these photos. There are 4 different types of wood on the first floor alone, so we stained everything to match the kitchen floors, which are the darkest. Below you can see the
dining room floors on the left and the kitchen floors on the right. I love, love, love having hardwood floors in our kitchen.
We both cook a lot, so we really want to take our time to figure out how the room does and doesn't work before we make any drastic changes. The cabinets were built by the previous owners and are built like a brick...well, let's just say they were built to last. I painted the lower cabinets in Valspar's Forest Canopy Green and swapped out the old hardware for brass
Bedford pulls and knobs by Martha Stewart for Home Depot. We left the upper cabinets white to sort of blend with the walls. I'm only showing half the room because we chopped up one side of the upper cabinets and it's a total wreck. I waffle between getting rid of the upper cabinets altogether or just changing the style. Please weigh in here: do you prefer upper cabinets or no upper cabinets?
We found the "island" in the barn; it was the previous owner's woodshop work bench. PRH hauled it out of the barn, cleaned it, sanded it, and coated it with food grade mineral oil. It may be a little wobbly on top, but it's the perfect height and works great for now. PRH is itching to have it back out in the barn. We keep fizzy water, veggies, and the kids' drawing materials on the bottom (the old picnic basket is full of construction paper and coloring books).
You can sort of see where we've chopped the upper cabinets (far right). The backsplash, if I can even call it that, is actually two layers of super old linoleum that's tacked (yes, with thumb tacks) to the original plaster/lathe walls. My parents gave us a lovely gas stove to replace that electric beast, so we may tackle the backsplash situation when we replace the stove. Deep breaths, PRH.
Ahhh...the green countertops. For as old as they are they're in good shape, and they've grown on me. We need to figure out what to do with the cabinets before we make any decisions about the countertops.
The light between the windows isn't original. The bathroom in our
Buffalo apartment had similar fixtures (including chrome-topped bulbs) and I always liked how simple they were. We wanted something to blend a bit, so my parents gave us this light fixture that they had kicking around in their barn. Yay! Thanks, Mom and Dad!
So, that's 1/2 of our kitchen tour for now. Like I said, it is a work in progress, but I promise to be less anxious about showing our progress. Thanks for the push,
Lynn!
1. Beautifully wrapped gifts from Time of the Aquarius (found via Suann Song).
