Help in the Kitchen

First let me say, that there are many areas in my home that I'd love to tackle and remodel to give them more of a prim look, but our budget says "take it easy and slow and pick one to begin." So, I narrowed it down to three...the downstairs hall bathroom, the staircase (doing hardwood & barn red) or the kitchen. Now having my rathers, I'd choose either the kitchen or staircase because they're all connected and open into our living room and dining areas. (Although the bathroom would have been the least expensive). But as it turns out, the decision was made easier when we had to get the new appliances recently. It just seemed sensible and even exciting that the kitchen should be next to go ahead and complete the "new look". Even Jason is excited! (I'm going to show you pictures of the kitchen as it is now...throughout this post.)





So...it started with me wanting to paint. Now I also need to point out that my cabinets are oak...kind of a honey oak. Jason has a "thing" about painting over oak or lots of different woods, for that matter. As good as he is about letting me do pretty much what I want with our home and paint whatever I want (and whatever color), he just doesn't want the cabinets painted. And I could only enjoy it anyway if we were "in it" together. So it's about compromise sometimes, isn't it? I figure it's a challenge anyway, but I can still get the primitive look I want...I'll make it work! (It may actually make it even more fun!) We'll be changing the hardware on the cabinets to a black with a sort of aged bronze coming through (so sort of a distressed black, I guess you would say).





Anyway, back to the paint....all of the tones I liked...the tans, mustards, goldish tones...just do nothing against the cabinets because of their honey tone. Anything like that just looks blah or blends or fades together. I thought about the barn red/burgundy, but I have that in the living room in a fairly large area and both Jason and I agree it would be "too much". Besides, I love to accent with reds in my kitchen and that's kind of hard to do if you already have red on the wall. So, we were thinking a prim colonial shade of green would be nice. I see alot of trim painted like that in magazines and in old homes, so we set out looking and nothing really seemed just right. Recently, though, I got my summer issue of Mercantile Gatherings and Kathy Lemay had photos of her shoppe, The Olde Homestead, in it. She had two greens that caught my eye and I called her and mentioned I was calling about a green paint I saw. She immediately knew which one I was referring to because evidently she gets lots of visitors to her shop that ask what color it is and compliment that shade. It is Lowe's Eddie Bauer called Bittersweet.





Jason and I went to Lowe's looking for it (in the greens) and was about to give up when I looked down a bit and saw Bittersweet in the sort of gray areas. I didn't think that could possibly be it, but we brought it home anyway, and I emailed her this time asking her if she was SURE! (lol!) She said, no question, no doubt, do it...you'll love it! When we hold it against our wall and cabinets, it does look the colonial green shade. I've never had a color this dark, so I've been a little apprehensive about that, but everyone that sees the paint sample so far against my cabinets and floors likes it. So, we're going to try it.....Jason has assured me that if it's too dark for me or I just don't like it...it's okay, we'll just get something else. We do get alot of light streaming in through the bay windows in the kitchen and through the sunporch and then from the living room because we have a dormer sky light window in there.





These are the rooms adjoining so you can see the color of the paint in there....the living room (color called New England Red) and the dining room (this is called Island Sand and is a tannish, goldish tone):


This dining room color here appears more yellow than it is...it is actually sort of a tannish/goldish tone:

Same thing here: This looks more yellow than it is. I wanted you to see how the kitchen is visible from the dining room. This is looking through the pass-through:


While at Lowe's we also looked at the countertops. You know one thing leads to another. I have the old butcher block look now. It's not that bad and I could live with them, but new ones would be nice. We looked at laminate and of course, I picked out the most expensive laminate there was (without seeing a price tag). Jason says I'm really good at that! :) We also have a new sink and hardware picked out (like Linda's of Behind My Red Door, if you remember hers). After looking at the laminate and picking out samples to bring home, we also saw in the kitchen display area, a countertop done with the 6" ceramic tiles. We really liked that. It really began to grow on me, so we brought home samples of that. We figured it all up and it would cost half the price of the laminate counters (with us supplying the labor). So, I have samples of all of these laminate AND tiles and it starts to get confusing.



So I need some help in the kitchen. What do you think? I've talked to a few people that have ceramic tile counters that love them. Any thoughts or comments on tile versus laminate for countertops?

Here's a couple of the laminates that we liked (if we went with laminate...we were leaning toward either the left or right one):



Here's the bittersweet paint color against the cabinets (and then against the trim in breakfast area):





Here's the tiles against the cabinets:



This shows all the samples together. Here you can see what the tiles and bittersweet look like against the cabinets, the tiled floor and the bricks under the stove. (One of the colors of the tiles...the one on the bottom left is almost exactly the color of the floor although it doesn't look it so much here):



We're thinking of painting the pedestal of the table black as well as the chairs and distressing them. Do you think that will be too much black with the black appliances and against the bittersweet color?

Here's a little more of the old kitchen decor (now all gone off the walls)...they look so bare, but I'm ready for a fresher, cleaner, simpler prim/farmhouse look.









So tell me what you think....I'd love some help in the kitchen! :)