Power(s) House: The kitchen

When we purchased this house, we were optimistic about the paint choices the previous owner made. While they weren't colors we could live with, we thought they'd be a sinch to change. Bzz! Wrong! Here's the most pronounced original color in the kitchen.

The previous owners left the paint behind (in the attic) and it is named "Fire Bush". We like to think of it more as coral.

This color really brought out the terra cotta color in the floor. Mix this with the yellow light bulbs and it was a warm (like really warm) toned house.

Once we started looking at paint swatches, we realized this was going to be a bigger deal than we bargained for. The 10 - 12' ceilings were also in need of painting since we were not keeping the Harvest Gold - a color used for the entire house, floor to ceiling. Sample after sample (9 of them to be exact) failed us miserably. Our painting process was starting to resemble the stages of grief quickly. Eventually, after searching through numerous magazines and websites, we settled on a color for the walls in the dining area - Swiss Coffee by Behr. This color is a warm barely off-white, with an under note of brown.

Now for the kitchen walls, it had to be a color to accent the other, but not too dark due to the wood color of the cabinets (painting these were not an option - that's enough trouble to make a nun drink a bottle of tequila) and it had to tone down the err...interesting color of trim the previous owner chose (again, not an option to paint... at the moment). After going through another six samples, I'd had enough! I knew I liked the Swiss Coffee color and I liked variations of the now 14 other samples, so I started mixing and viola! the perfect color. It is a mix of khaki and gray. The pictures below don't quite do it justice, but we like it.

And now for our freshly painted kitchen and dining area...

The kitchen - an open area to the living room and dining area. (Close up pics to follow in a later post)

We really enjoy sitting at the island or having guests be a part of the cooking while we are entertaining. While we loved our previous kitchen, it closed us off to any entertaining. And by us, I mean me - Natalie. We changed out two of the light fixtures (previously an older looking can-lighting and a chandelier - see pics above) and intend to change the light over the sink...if we can find one we love.

The dining area

Our plans for this include a new round table that extends for entertaining and a chalk board for the white wall space next to the built-ins, behind the light. We're thinking one that looks like this or this (check out the room views if it doesn't automatically take you there).

The content of the built-ins are a work in progress. I don't know how you unpack, but we unpack in stages - the bare minimum, then our favorites and then everything else we have put into closets that needs unpacking, but you just can't bring yourself to do until six months after moving in. Right now, we're at the bare minimum with a few favorites mixed in. I like to think we're starting with a bare palette, Travis thinks I am crazy.