Life On Virginia Street

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Kitchen Tour and an Exciting Announcement!

Room Makeovers + Design Plans

For those of you that follow me on Instagram or read this post, you may have noticed I have been talking a lot about countertop and tile samples. Well, somewhat out of the blue, my husband said he was ready to tackle the kitchen. What?! Granted, we knew when we purchased the house that we would need to invest in new countertops and backsplash tile, but I thought it would be a few years down the road yet. The good news is we love the bones of the kitchen so we knew any updates would be fairly affordable.
We fully realize our kitchen is gorgeous in its own way, but certain things feel “off” to us. And since we consider this our forever-until-we-retire home, we want to make the changes we can enjoy. We love the layout, cabinet style, etc. but not necessarily the materials used. And since we are eating {what feels like the majority of our lives} and spend a lot of time in this area, we decided it’s time to move forward with the updates we have known would need to happen since the day we moved in.
We’ve already made some good progress in making it ours since the day we first saw the home and it looked like this:
Its amazing how a little swap in paint, lights and chairs can transform a space and overall feel in a room. But, we still have some changes we want to make. What we want to change:
The countertops are currently quartz, and I realize it may seem illogical to some that we plan to replace them. But, we hate our island countertops {which are different than our exterior counters}. And surprisingly, I think my husband hates them more than I do. They are VERY cream {which doesn’t show up well in most of my photos}. But they have random orangish pattern throughout that always makes our countertops looked stained or dirty. I’m hopeful that we could sell the existing counters on Craig’s List {most of our pieces are full pieces without seams} and help fund the project.
Here are the counters on our perimeter. We actually still like these counters, but if we’re changing out the island/backsplash/cabinet color, etc. we want to move to a gray tone so these will no longer work. If you’re in the Omaha area, let me know if you would be interested in these as we will have three medium to large pieces available and likely a bathroom countertop!
The backsplash looked great when our home was more mission style. But it is WAY too dark and busy for me {the backsplash annoys me more than the counters do – probably because I know what an easy change it is}. I’ll show you my thoughts on the future look tomorrow.
I love the style of our cabinets. However, as I have outlined in entirely too many posts, our trim throughout our home as well as our cabinets are very cream/beige/not white. They look white until you see real white anywhere near them and they just feel drabby to me {they definitely appear lighter in photos}. The kitchen cabinets {as well as those in the powder bath} have a glaze used as well, adding to the darker look I want to remove. I told my husband I didn’t want to go through countertop changes unless the cabinets could go all white {since the countertops I have in mind will not go with cream cabinets at.all}. The problem with this change: once the cabinets go white, the ceiling, doors, trim, baseboards, etc. all need repainted. Ugh.

Our microwave is randomly placed on this shelf and makes the kitchen feel cheap.  We want to see if there is a trim kit that can help it look a little more built in. We know that the microwave is deeper than the cabinet space allotted, so that will always be a problem, but if we can close off some of the gaps above and on the sides, that may help make it look less low-budget. We may even just need a new microwave {haven’t run that by the husband yet} – this one burns my popcorn every.single.time. Seriously – nothing is worse than burnt popcorn.

While the cabinets on the exterior are being repainted, we plan to lighten the island as well. I’ll share our plans on that in the post tomorrow as well. You can see the edges on the black paint are not wearing well and I feel like the black is just a little too harsh for the light and bright space I am wanting.

While our sink is a minor nuisance, this will be something we change if we move forward. It is rather shallow, the shape is awkward and we aren’t a fan of the stainless which a nightmare to keep clean. We’d like to move to a single bowel. The challenge is that the space we have is rather tight and it is hard to fit a faucet and sink in the depth and width we have available without keeping the same awkward shape. We’re continuing our search.

What seems like a few minor changes quickly adds up. We are supposed to have a bid on the countertops this week, so we’ll see if this project is even feasible. From there I will bid out the cabinet paint costs. I know the backsplash will be a minor project.

Tomorrow I’ll plan to share the changes we plan to make in the kitchen if all bids come back accordingly to our estimates. It will involve new countertops, backsplash, sink/faucet and paint color changes {to both the cabinets and island}. Hopefully then you won’t think I’m crazy for changing a perfectly good kitchen. Until then!

P.S. I received some exciting news this week! I have been selected, along with 13 other fabulous bloggers, to be on the Country Chic Paint Blog Squad this year! This means even more fun chalk-based paint projects headed your way!

P.P.S. Don’t forget to comment on this blog post for your chance to win a $50 Home Depot gift card. This contest is only open to the readers of my blog, so don’t miss out on this great opportunity! You can enter until next Monday night.

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  2. Vel Criste says

    Good luck Sarah! I’m sure all the choices you make will be beautiful! I did the trim kit for my microwave, i have a big microwave though, I think it’s 20 cubic feet! Check it out if you have the time, I got mine from amazon. Lisa from Shine your light also wrote a great post before on microwaves and that’s how I found out about the trim kit!

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  5. Erin@Suburban Bitches says

    I Just told my husband this morning that come the first of the year my next project is our kitchen. I too plan on painting our cabinets- a very light gray to gray-white and even though we already painted our island white (it was originally black) I’m going to paint that a darker greenish-gray. And the granite countertop on the island has to go! I’m thinking a lighter whitish gray quartz. I’m interested in the cost of changing out the island countertops. Would you mind sharing your quotes with me when you get them? Can’t wait to see your transformation!

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