Kitchen: Before & After

We have lived in our cottage for a year now and my favourite space has always been the kitchen. We love food. We love entertaining. I love baking! The kitchen is the heart of a home to us. Our previous apartment had the teeniest weeniest kitchen you could imagine. It was not well looked after by the landlords and we had about 2ft of worktop in total. There was no way we were getting anywhere to sit in there, so we had a little fold down table and stools in the living room. We were SO excited when we first went to visit what would become our new home...

BEFORE:

The kitchen is a really good size, but was not very sensibly organised as you can see. Don't even get me started on that rug! The whole house was different beige tones and the kitchen was no exception. Those tiles too... However we are very fortunate in our lease that they think of the house as 'ours' to a degree, so we were allowed to fix it all up. 

AFTER:

What a difference a bit of paint makes! We painted the entire house white to start us off and then added a few feature walls. We decided on a chalkboard wall for the kitchen as it made something of an unused space. It was also a good way to hide the radiator. The table was bought at a flea market in Knutsford from a lovely man who was using it to display his items. It was already grey, so we just gave the tops a two tone teal. 

This wall was inspired by Rice DK's new wallpaper range. I wanted something a little less busy, as we love to have coloured 'things' but I tend to keep the backgrounds mostly white. The little bookshelves from Ikea keep my current favourites handy, but also disguise an ugly blanked socked on the wall ;). We also painted all of the cabinets to make the space brighter - they are a laminate wood, but this worked surprisingly well. The difference it has made to the feel of the room was totally worth the effort! New tiles were essential too, as the previous ones were dark and broken. We chose bright white subway tiles all around.

Paint is my BFF. Anything can be given a new lease of life with a bit of paint.

So there you have it! What do you think?