We All Live in a Yellow Submarine - Kitchen Part One

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had big plans for our kitchen.  We've lived in this house for 7 years now and, while I thought our kitchen was to die for when we moved in, I quickly got over that feeling.  Our house was practically brand new, though, and I felt like it was wasteful to do anything to it until it had been properly amortized.  I figured it had to be 10 years old before I could change it up.  (?!?! yeah, I have no idea)

Here's the kitchen as it was:

Very yellow.  The fact that the wood floors and the cabinets were the same color all the way to the ceiling drove me crazy!

It actually was only this bland for the last several months.  Prior to that I had the walls painted two tones of aqua, with a light shade on the top third and a darker shade on the bottom.  It was very Vern Yip and actually looked much better than it sounds.  The tile has some aqua in it and it was the only color I could figure to pull in.

I got tired of the bright colors, though, and just painted everything cream until I figured out what else to do.

Last summer, my dislike of the kitchen was quickly heading towards hate - especially for the slatey blue-green tile that was impossible to coordinate with.  Then, I stumbled onto a picture of Layla's kitchen at The Lettered Cottage.  So beautiful and she did it all herself.  I knew I couldn't get away with having black cabinets because our kitchen gets very little natural light, but I saw Layla does consultations, so I signed up!

Here was Layla's inspiration drawing for me:

I got this picture one night in August while on vacation (I was looking at it on my phone!) and was so excited, I couldn't sleep.  It was just so much brighter and sooo much more interesting!  LOVE the pendant lights and the cross-back bar stools.  I couldn't believe that could actually be MY kitchen!

Best of all, it seemed completely doable.  Most of the changes were paint and we've tiled before, so I knew we could do the kitchen too.  I managed to convinced my husband that we should lay tile the first week in October, which gave me a month to get the cabinets painted.  I could not WAIT to get started...