Kitchen Re-Do!

I'm doing some catch up blogs, because, well, I haven't been good about keeping up with my blog. So, the next few blogs will be of events past, but they're still relevant! I promise!

When we bought out house 4 years ago, a lovely older lady had lived here for 16 years. And in that time, not much redecorating or updating had been done. Josh and I love to look at houses for what they could be and what character they hold. This house was no different.

There were three rooms in the house that have begged for a re-do since we did our first walk through- the third bedroom (it had paneling and blue carpet), the master bathroom (it has yellow tiles on every wall 3/4 of the way up), and the kitchen.

Oh, the kitchen. I spent every day for a week solid after we closed on the house scraping 3 layers of wallpaper off. Of course, then I had to mud, sand, and repaint. The colors I had picked for the kitchen were a group of yellows, but, to be honest, I hadn't honed in on my decorating skills yet, so it looked pretty bad. They had drywalled off the space between the top of the cabinets to the ceiling, so we knocked that out to add height and storage. Some of it has been finished, but Josh is a really busy man so two of the above cabinet spaces have still not been mudded or painted. However, The rest of the kitchen has been updated!

I'm a sucker for two magazines- Southern Living and Country Living. They always have some kind of decor that I'm crazy about. I saw an article where they had taken the cabinet doors off and it left this wonderful open space to display your dishes as well as knick-knacks. You all know my love of junkin', so I had plenty to fill the spaces! We had lots of left over paint, so this cost me absolutely NOTHING! I don't have any before pictures, but I do have now pictures! And here they are!

 I took off the cabinet doors and used primer white on all of the cabinets inside and out. If you look closely, you'll see a lot of my junkin' treasures and my jars of olive oils and flower petals (used for my perfumes and some cooking seasonings. We're using lavender on our Turkey this year.)

Here, I painted the walls and used the primer white again. I sewed together some burlap valances and hung my burlap tea holder. See that picture on the far right? My mom painted that. I need to do a post on her paintings alone. They're incredible. Also to the right is my infamous tea shelf. I typically have around 10+ different teas as well as my own mixtures on hand for different ailments.  We still have some wood paneling that needs to have something done with it (you can kind of see it in the bottom picture).

Since I had everything on hand, this re-do was completely free (other than the two days of my life I'll never get back). I want you to get creative when you get the urge to remodel.  Reuse and Repurpose! Not only is it good for the environment, but it's good for you wallet and creativity as well!

Happy re-dos!
-Heather