In our old house in Cincinnati, we painted the feature wall a nice soft buttery yellow color, and I absolutely loved it. Everything else in the kitchen was white, and at the time I didn’t know how that played into my love of the kitchen, until now. We had a white ceiling, white floors, white appliances, and the other 3 walls were white. We had dark brown cabinets on one of the walls, but other than that, the whole room was filled with a soft light glow, especially in the morning and evening when the light was coming in from different angles. I always smiled as soon as I walked in that room. So when we decided to paint this house, I took a similar approach, not taking into account any other factors in my decision other than having loved my old yellow kitchen.
And I ended up with this. It is not actually such a bad picture, and you are more likely to look at the clutter than the wall color (please don’t though, it’s not usually as bad as this!) If I had thought ahead, I would have taken pictures of it at the times of day when it bothered me the most, but this was more of a last minute, I’m-about-to-paint-over-this-so-I-should-take-a-before-picture. Anyway, in this house, my kitchen is filled with beautiful maple colored cabinets and drawers. Pretty much from the top to the bottom I have a warm orange-y brown color.
In our dining nook, our table also has a walnut colored finish, and our sliding doors are covered by a dark brown curtain, which was specifically chosen to give us a bit of privacy, but also allow us to see the backyard through the curtain, so that we could enjoy the great scenery that we lucked into when we bought this house.
All of this brown plus the yellow wall color means that all day our kitchen is full of a warm orange glow, which I hate. It is dark, orange, impossible to decorate, and I just hate it. I’ve realized in this process that I just really prefer neutral and cool colors. They are on my walls, in the decorations that I put out, on the things that I make, in my closet and even the clothes that I buy for Chris and Jayce. Furthermore, I have been trying unsuccessfully to decorate this room ever since we moved in, but every time that I hold something up against the walls, it just doesn’t look right with the yellow and ends up somewhere else.
So this past weekend, when Mom came into town to visit, this was our big project. The kitchen.
I knew what color I wanted on the walls instead. Something that would compliment the cabinets better and bring down the orange-y yellow factor a ton: a nice cool grey blue. We went to the wall with a few paint samples and were really surprised by results. In the picture below, the 2 colors on the left are the exact same colors that are beside them on the white! Don’t they look so different? (Just say yes, and appease me, please.) I couldn’t believe when I first painted them how periwinkle colored they looked! A friend came by and commented, “Yep, the yellow just completely sucks the grey out of those colors.” (That yellow paint, it does stuff like that.) Luckily we tried the colors on white, were able to get a better idea of what the color would look like, and picked a good one.
Another picture of the grey-sucking yellow color.
The funny thing about Mom and I painting the kitchen is that last Christmas, Mom, Chelsea and I painted the kitchen this yellow color in a weekend painting extravaganza. Chelsea wasn’t able to come to town this time, and was really annoyed that we were painting over the yellow, which she liked. She had taken tons of time to carefully tape off all of the edges of the room and paint the annoying small spots that mom and I had put off, and was probably even more annoyed than she was letting on that we were painting over the evidence of all of her hard work.
So Chelsea, I would like to dedicate this post, the yellow post, to you. You were not afraid to go the extra mile, and put yourself a position that someone could possibly photograph and harass you over, in order to get the yellow edges painted perfectly.
All together now, “She’s going the distance, she’s going for speed…”
Stay tuned for pictures of the new kitchen, in all of it’s loveliness…
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