On Monday we showed you the updates we made to our kitchen cabinets over the past week or so, but the process wasn’t quite over yet. After painting the area above our cabinetry, we still had to go back and touch up the walls and ceiling.
Touch ups always take me forever! I swear, painting a straight line with that tan wall paint took almost as long as installing the trim in the first place, but now there’s a nice sharp line between the cabinets and the walls on the left and right side of the kitchen.
After I finished all the touch ups and washed out my paintbrush, I stepped back and decided the kitchen was looking awfully white-washed.
Several months ago, we wrote a post about what we would change in our kitchen if we had the chance. One of the items on that list was adding a small open shelf somewhere so we could put pretty kitchen things and cookbooks on display. I can’t believe it took nearly four years of living in this house to realize it, but all we needed to do to create a cookbook shelf was take the doors off that cabinet above the sink!
You can see I couldn’t wait to “stage” our little shelf. I tried out the cookbooks with the doors open at first and, when we both liked the result, I got out the power drill and took down the doors.
Of course that meant getting the trim paint back out after patching and sanding over the hinge holes, but it was worth the effort!
Now it’s as if those doors never existed!
We were careful not to close the cabinet doors on either side of this shelf before the paint was fully cured.
Once it was dry, though, we happily shut the doors and admired the change. Is it silly that something as simple as a cookbook shelf can make me so happy?
As a little reminder, here’s where we left off last time…
And a few tweaks later, here’s our kitchen now!
Do you think the shelf was an improvement? We saved the cabinet doors in case we ever want to put them back on (or if we decide the kitchen needs more cabinet space when we sell our house), but I think the shelf draws the eye up and adds some fun color in our kitchen.
We’re getting closer to the end of the month, which means closer to new floors in this room! We still want to replace the countertops and backsplash, but the kitchen is (happily) a far cry from how it looked the day we bought our house.
Quite the change, right?
