Welcome to the next room in my Adventures in Home Ownership series – the kitchen! If you thought our dining room was a mess when we got started, just wait until you see this kitchen! The “before” photos were taken when we toured the house for the first time. The previous home owner had moved out, but apparently she forgot to take quite a few of her things with her (may I offer you some Big K?
). To highlight the style of this room, I will direct your attention to the floral and fruity wall paper (which my sister-in-law humorously referred to as scratch and sniff, though you wouldn’t want to smell it!), the golden door pulls, the outdated white appliances, and the sea foam green counter tops and matching blinds – all of which came together to form one big room full of yuck!
The first thing to go was the fridge. It was plugged in but clearly wasn’t working, as we discovered when we opened it (you don’t even want to know what was in there! Gross!). Then my mom and I proceeded to tear down the wallpaper. After a few futile attempts to remove the bottom layer, I decided to just paint over it. We covered the wall paper liner (the yellow stuff in the top right corner of the next pic) with 2 coats of oil based primer (which you can see on the left). It provided us a surprisingly solid, smooth surface to paint over. And it was so much less work!
After we finished two thorough coats of priming, we painted the room a neutral tan. It isn’t in our budget to replace the counters yet, so we chose a color that would not compete with them. The color change, plus the change of the appliances and door pulls to stainless steel, gives this room a completely different energy. I love cooking in here now!
It amazes me how changing out the appliances immediately updates a space. It looks so clean and shiny!
The next room on our little adventure will be the living room (which you got a little glimpse of in the previous image). You will not believe what color the “accent wall” was in this room!