It's amazing how much of a difference a fresh coat of paint can in a room! That's what I spent most of my Saturday doing, cleaning, prepping, then finally painting our kitchen, and we LOVE how it turned out! We are slowly (and I mean slooooooowly) renovating our kitchen piece by piece. Here's a picture of what we started with when we moved in almost four years ago:
It makes me cringe everytime I'm reminded of THAT wallpaper lol. This is the wall between the kitchen and living room. Since then we have tore out the chair molding, removed wallpaper, repainted twice, and added an opening in that wall.
This is the new paint, it is 7669 Summit Gray from Sherwin Williams. This is also the end result of the opening that we added about three years ago, I really love how it helped to open up the kitchen.
This is before my hubby tore out the wood paneling soffit above the cabinets. Also the set of base cabinets with the green countertop used to be the island in my in-laws house. When they renovated their kitchen a year and a half ago, they saved it for us. It fit perfectly under the two upper cabinets on the one wall that didn't have a set of base cabinets.
Then we had to take the upper cabinets out so our new fridge could fit :). This was taken after I had primed the drywall. Getting rid of the wood paneling soffit really helped to open up the kitchen and made the ceiling appear to be higher.
Pardon the mess, my talented husband is currently in the process of installing new upper cabinets to replace the old ones. He's also building an open shelving unit to go above the fridge, we sat down and designed it together and I can't wait until it's done! The cabinets will be stained dark cherry and i'm excited to see how it will all look together. We're also playing around with the layout of the kitchen, for now we're using the island we received as an island, and so far I'm really liking how much extra food prep space it's giving me. Eventually we'll replace all of the cabinets, but since we're doing it all ourselves, it's going to be a slow process and we'll have a mismatched kitchen for a little while but we're saving money so we both think it'll be worth it in the end. Once we've replaced all of the cabinets we'll have someone install granite countertops and replace our backsplash, and sometime during that process we'll replace our tile floor with 18x18 tiles that we already picked out and have sitting in our garage. The following pictures are the before and afters.
I pulled this photo off of Bower Power Blog here, the open shelving above the fridge is what our shelving above our fridge will look like.
This is similar to the color our cabinets will be and what kind of granite we'll eventually get. Until it's finished i'll keep dreaming on pinterest ;).
One last thing, I decided to change the name of my blog from "Matt and Ashley" to "The Martin Home". The reason behind the name change is that I want to continue to grow my blog and use it to share all of our home improvements, all my craft projects and eventually share our journey into parenthood (when that happens ;)), so I felt it was an appropriate change. Thanks for everyone that stops by and reads my blog!
-xo Ashley
