Kitchen Makeover- Paint Changes Everything

If anyone asked me what my favorite room in the house is, it would usually be my family room.
It’s cozy, I love the paint color in there and it’s where the television is.

But tie for the favorite room is my kitchen.
Because I spend more time in that room probably than any other.
I cook in here, help kids with homework in here, do craft projects in here, bake in here, do the bills in here, eat all our meals in here, sit around the kitchen table and talk in here.
It is where we do most of our living.

When we first moved to our home in 2005, the kitchen had little character.
Builder-grade white walls, no decor to speak of and there just wasn’t a lot of love in this room.

In fact, here are some pictures I have of our home before we bought it:

There are a lot of bloggers who are painting their cabinets white and that’s great but to those who are still on the fence?
RESIST THE URGE.
You will clean your cabinets for the rest of your ever-loving lives.
It never ever ends.
It’s this abysmal pit of cleaning that will go on and on and on and on and on…
Embrace your oak cabinets.
With all of your being.

Despite the sea of white that I saw when I walked into my kitchen for the first time, it was an amazing space.
My mom compared it to a farmhouse kitchen because it was its own separate room unlike most kitchens today where they open up to a family room.
This actually was exactly what I was looking for originally, but over the years, I have embraced this kitchen.

So it makes sense that the first room we painted the summer we moved in was the kitchen.
Because if I was gonna spend a lot of time in this room, it needed to be any color other than white.
We picked this teal color; I wish I could remember the name, but it was almost eight years ago.
This is what our kitchen looked like with the teal:

And as much great natural light as we got in this room, this color really dragged down the kitchen.
Especially in the winter months.

The one significant thing about this color is that it made the white appliances look better, if that’s even possible.
Hey, I am just glad they aren’t avocado green, not that there is anything wrong with that either.

I have wanted to paint this kitchen many times over the years.
At one point, I even wanted to paint it red.
But thought that would make it even darker, and we wanted to go in the other direction.

Then this summer, I stumbled upon a color by Benjamin Moore called Revere Pewter and it was life-changing.
Because it made our master bath and the girls’ bath look so much richer and brighter.

And then I stumbled upon this color on a favorite blog of mine:

Isn’t that green amazing?
I am not normally a huge fan of green paint.
I mean, I guess you could say the teal I have in the kitchen is green but not GREEN green.
But when I saw this, I knew immediately I needed to have it in my home somewhere.
I asked Holly over at Life as a Thrifter what color this was, and she said Offbeat Green by Sherwin Williams.
I then went to my local Sherwin Williams store, got the swatch, and put it away for over a month.
Originally, I thought about painting my entire kitchen this color.
But I wanted to shy away from such a bold color in my kitchen, would I really want to do another bold color?
So I had an idea; paint an accent wall in the kitchen green but the rest do in a neutral Revere Pewter.
I headed over to Home Depot with my Sherwin Williams swatch in hand and we got to work.

Painting prep is never pretty or fun.

The green is up!

I never said painting was pretty.
But look at how much brighter it is!

And here is our new kitchen:

I am officially in love with that green accent wall.
And I am so glad we did just one wall in the green.
Because the Revere Pewter is such a neutral that it would have looked so blah on every single wall.
Although now I wish I had painted every wall in Offbeat Green.
Yet, I wonder if having it on every wall would have been overkill?

Still getting used to the neutral after having such a dark color on the walls.
But we all love how it looks in here now.
So much brighter.

It feels so fresh in here now.

That clock I got at Target last year for $3 on clearance. The “our life” sign I actually made from an old sign two summers ago. The artwork clip strip I got at Goodwill last year for $2.99. The curtains are from Lowe’s.

I don’t think I have ever loved a paint color so much.

This was with the overhead lights off and it’s still bright and cheery!

Here is the original before:

The before:

And the after: