Kitchen Refresh Reveal

Today we are taking a trip back to our first house. Maybe not physically, but virtually.

Before you check out all the photos, you should check out my inspiration first. 

As promised when I told you about buying our second house that I would update you on all of the updates we had not shared yet. So here we go.
I don’t know how many times people asked me if we remodeled our kitchen after we completed our update.

For less than $700, people thought we had done a $5,000+ plus kitchen remodel. I would say that is a great return on my money!

In the 3 years we lived in our house, I swore we would banish the weird yellow/green/brown trim that filled our house. Pictures never due the strange color justice.  In every room the trim looked slightly a different color from the room next to it, but the one thing it never did was  look good.

I also believe that paint is the most under rated decorating tool you have in your DIY arsenal.  Painting the trim, ceiling and walls made our kitchen brighten right up.  The new blind I promised,  fit like a glove.  Much better than the one that was hanging by twisty ties prior.

I decided to go with the whitecliff beige for the walls.  Once the painting was done, the flow into the living room was perfect. Although I picked a different paint color for the kitchen, more of a cream, than the grey in of the living room, it looked the same in the day light. Oh well, it meant that everything blended together very well.

The new wall colors really acted as a nice contrast to our dark cabinets {that were already there} and our stainless appliances {also already there}.  You would not believe how many people asked if we had installed new cabinets and appliances. It really speaks to how color can impact the impression of a space.  Although we had a fairly updated kitchen, the dated paint color really inhibited you from seeing the new finishes.

My favorite part of the whole kitchen were these open shelves we installed on the blank canvas of our kitchen corner. I had found these steel shelving brackets on Pinterest, and commissioned my brother-in-law, who is a welder, to replicate them for me.  I could not be happier with how they turned out.

Tiling all the way to the ceiling was in my mind the whole time. The idea was festering for a long time, and I told countless people about my kitchen refresh plans. Everyone I talked to had their own opinions about my idea. Many people thought the idea sounded strange or the method that I wanted to use was not going to work. Little did they know, I had spent hours of my life searching Pinterest and reading blog posts to create my master plan.  When all was said and done, I am glad I stuck to my guns and went through with it. The tile was a real show stopper, and I could not love the tile I picked out more.

Since we put our house on the market only a few months after we completed this project, I never was able to really style the shelves the way I has originally envisioned.

Something you do not see anymore?? The modem and router!  They both are tucked away nicely into the magazine holder and storage box. This was a huge win for me. I always hated that the connections for the internet was on the counter.

Our small galley kitchen seemed to get much bigger after the updates. The shelves helped open up cabinet space for items that had originally lived on the counter to be tucked away, and made my baking items much more accessible.

I will share one secret with you, our kitchen only looked this clean because I took the photos when our house was on the market. I had cleared almost everything off the cabinets to make the space look more presentable.  I could never maintain a kitchen this clean. I always have something going on in my kitchen.

I still sit back and think, did our kitchen really turn out like that? Then I wonder how I lived so long with out making the updates.

If you want to check out the before photos, you can check out the gallery here.

Don’t forget to follow My Urban Oven on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, for more inspiration, my continued ramblings, and photos of what is happening in the My Urban Oven House! 

XOXO, 

Rachel

P.S. I am falling for Instagram Stories… so don’t forget to follow!!