Painting the Kitchen

I finally painted the kitchen!  It was the last week before school restarted and I figured I better get my act together and not procrastinate anymore.  The original color of the kitchen isn't so bad, but somehow maybe the color was just a bit too yellow? It seems just a bit dark in kitchen especially with the dark/brown-colored cabinets.  Maybe the idea of putting up the plantation shutters in this back living room wasn't such a good idea.  Hmm... I suppose I shouldn't be saying that because we paid a lot of those new shutters.  Oops!

Anyway,... I did find some new pendant lighting to create a little "color splash" in the kitchen.  

We had some clear pendants that I just weren't very happy about.  We don't have any green color in this house, so this is good.  Makes me happy :-)

Did I mention that I was going to paint the ceiling too? The electrician had stepped through the kitchen ceiling when he was doing some work in the attic.  This was back when we were just moving into this house.  The hole has been patched up since but you can still see the different color (a lighter colored square shape) where it had been patched:

There's nothing more fun than prep work! NOT!!!  And I didn't really bother moving anything out of the kitchen.  I covered up the sink area with a big plastic tarp and just moved things from one section of the kitchen to another.  Ha ha!  Ya,... totally lazy:

The paint color is basically the same color as the boys' bathroom - one of the many shades of white. It's amazing how many different whites there are in the paint store!  This color was originally chosen for the kitchen and I knew I would have lots to spare so I decided to use it for the boys' bathroom.  You can sort of see the difference between the current and new color.  The new color is more white/to the left of the arrow:

I decided to paint the wall trim too, but then I noticed Graham and Charlie's height chart!  I'll have to figure this out, so I've left just that section unpainted for now:

There's so much stuff on the kitchen countertop so I decided to clear out some things from the cabinets and move them into the garage instead.  We obviously like KitchenAid products but then we don't use them enough:

Just enough space to get my paint brush around.  Phew!

As the other side of the kitchen is totally filled up!

After going through this one side with the new paint, I decided I wanted to try out some stenciling:

Instead of just one color, I decided to use 4 colors.  I picked out a pink color a while ago. I actually wanted to stencil the ceiling, but after going through the boys' bathroom, there was no way I was going to do THAT anymore!  The green is from the back living room, the grey is from the house trim, and the dark blue is from the front door color.  I think they all seem to meld pretty nicely together :-)

So far so good!  I was actually going to stencil a larger area but somehow the cabinets didn't line up with the stove and/or the microwave.  So I thought to just keep things simpler and line the stencils up to the microwave:

Tada!!!

Here's a closer look - it's not all perfect, which is something I think you can get away with, with stenciling:

It's a good thing we have lots of brushes to pick from. I'm not sure how we accumulated so many!  

It was a couple of days before I finally ended up painting the other side of the kitchen.  Thankfully it was only a small area:

Now that it's all done, I'm not sure if it actually feels brighter in the kitchen.  Ha ha!  Okay, I think it is just that tiny bit brighter, or at least I don't feel as depressed when I walk into the kitchen every day.  Just knowing that the entire kitchen has been painted and that the ceiling is all one color is probably good enough.  And like I said earlier, those new green pendant lighting makes me happy too.  So all in all, things are moving along in this house!  Now.... if I can only make these cabinets lighter!!! Better get my Thinking Hat on for that project :-)