Kitchen Renovation ~ Part 2

We have finally gotten the kitchen repainted and finished for the most part.  I posted back in September 2012 about opening up the wall in between the kitchen and the great room.  We are so happy that we made this change.  It makes a huge difference in how open that main family space feels.

The other major change that we wanted to make was to paint over the light mint green.  I do like green, but this color was doing nothing for me.  Here are the before photos from the listing once again...

These photos don't really show how green it really was.

And here is the wall that we knocked out to make an opening in between the kitchen and great room:


Because our mouldings are an off white, we decided to paint the walls a warm gray color.  I didn't want anything too bright, and the gray also works well with the markings in the marble.  We went with Benjamin Moore's Stonington Gray.  You can see it on this color swatch from The Daily B blog.



We really like it, and we actually decided to paint the great room the same color cut by 50%.

We also made two lighting changes.  I posted about the new banquette lighting back in August 2012 as well.  You can find that post HERE!

The other thing that we did was to change out the center ceiling light in the kitchen.  I am still not very fond of all the old school electric style lights, but the electrician made it sound virtually impossible to easily convert those to recessed lights.  Sooo...we are living with those for now.  I chose a pendant light from Overtsock.com which is much more cost effective than some similar versions I have seen on the internet.


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Here you can see into the kitchen from the great room:



My MIL made the new cafe curtains for my birthday. The blue helps to tie in the different blues that we have in the great room.


The sink and fixtures were in the house when we bought it.  I do love them, but with such a large sink, not having a sprayer can be a problem.

This is opposite the sink and sort of towards the banquette...you can see the new counter for the opening.



In the sink photo, you can see some of my homemade gifts from the boys.  I love having these out all year long.



Brendan made the bird in art class last year.  He is wearing a baseball cap.  Jackson made the pottery cup in the upper right photo.  It is supposed to represent the ocean waves and sand.  Pretty good, huh?  Jackson also painted the pot for Mother's Day a few years ago.  That bumblebee is his thumbprint.

The Kermit figure is mine.  I have kept him all these years.  I think I got him when I was 9 or 10.  He is sitting inside one of the glass cabinets.

I also found this wooden chalkboard sign on Etsy.  The link to the shop is HERE.


I admit that I do not change the verse every week.

We also added curtains to the bay window in the breakfast nook.  I wasn't sure about doing this, but we love them.  They are especially great for blocking the late afternoon sun.  I chose the same West Elm  Scribble curtains that we used in the Master Bathroom only these are in midnight blue.


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The pillows are from Overstock.com as well.


We are very happy with the updates that we have made.  It definitely makes this space feel more like ours.