Stinkerpants

Our House: Kitchen & Dining

April 6, 2011 in Personal Projects • Our Home

This is kind of a boring one, but it's part of the house, right? And I love looking at the interiors of people's houses, kitchens included. So here ya go!

Sadly, this blurry mess is the only "before" photo I have of the kitchen:

This is the view of the dining room, from inside the kitchen:

The corner of the dining room, which overlooks the living room.

The main things we changed were wall color and lighting. My father-in-law insisted that we needed recessed lighting in the kitchen, and we are SO glad we listened to him. We also had a pantry-in-the-form-of-a-huge-cupboard installed for our food - so happy about that, too!

The installation of the pantry:

Dining room, after:

The dining room table is from Cost Plus World Market, which we bought a few years ago when Y worked for them and we got a great discount. ;)  The photos on the wall are old photos of Oakland, which I found by googling "old photos of Oakland" (haha).  The prints on the left are our Laws of the Land and Bill of Rights.  We also had to get a new chandelier, because the previous owners ran off with whatever was hanging there before (if you'll remember, this condo was a foreclosure). The chandelier is from Lamps Plus.

We went a little wild with the color in the kitchen. We had a really hard time with this one (and the bathrooms) because the color of the granite is a greenish-brown and looks really sick unless it's with the right color.  My Father-in-Law couldn't believe we'd chosen nine colors for our house (including two different shades of gray), but even he had to admit it looked great when it was finished!

I didn't have anywhere to store my cookbooks, so we installed an industrial looking shelf from Ikea and mounted an Ikea magnetic strip underneath for my Cuisinart blades. So handy! The painting above it is the first painting I ever did, which was when I was in college. I wanted a painting I'd seen in Bed Bath & Beyond, but I couldn't afford it, so I reproduced it myself from an image I found on Google. I would never do this now (I believe all artists deserve to be paid for what they do!), but at the time I just really wanted something bright and happy in the kitchen and I had no money. Thank you to Will Rafuse for making such happy art for the kitchen, and I'm sorry that my 18 year-old self janked your artwork.

So that's it for the kitchen and dining room! Next stop, the living room.