You Should Have Seen It Before

Please Excuse This Break From Our Week Of Organization: I have a party to attend!

Jen at Sanctuary Arts At Home is having a "You Should Have Seen It Before!" event to bare our souls and show the embarrassing well-meaning decorating styles our houses have been through!

So, without further ado:
Here is out Kitchen

This is our first home- we bought it in December of 2006, and I LOVED that fact that our kitchen is really pretty big. But it was built in 1984 and hadn't been updated at all. I was an avid HGTV watcher- and just knew I could paint those cabinets white in an hour- just like on the shows! We moved in and within 24 hours, we were ripping down the wallpaper and getting geared up for the couple of hours we knew it would take us to transform and update our cabinets. WHAHAHAHA! Try over 6 days later! Talk about the blind leading the blind- which is never good when chemicals you can't pronounce are involved! We had really no idea what we were doing, and very quickly learned that any project you see on TV takes about 5 days longer than they lead you to believe.

But we did it! And I loved them white. I think it took away from the cream laminate counter tops and back splash.We also shadily-painted the kitchen by adding texture to the paint rather than properly sealing and re-doing the walls after we took all the wall paper down. (I regretted that for the next two years.) Style wise, I was going for a Lori Smith, classic-modern feel. Made window treatments and slip-covered my chairs with her fabric from Hancocks...
And then! Typical me, I wasn't happy with it. I decided that was not my aesthetic. I was more of a classic girl at heart. I felt the khaki was too blah. So I started painting the kitchen with some old white paint I found in the garage in morning. Something was wrong with it and it smelled so awful, we had to vacate the house for two days. I Jason had to totally repaint the kitchen- and so of course, we had to start over and chose a new paint color. It was a beautiful blue-Picaso Blue (Or Dallas Cowboys blue according to Jas!) and I found some Waverly paisley fabric that I loved and made new curtains and chair covers... I don't have a good pic, but you can see it behind Miss O in this shot. We loved the bright blue against my crisp white cabinets. It was bright and sunny... I was slowly on my way to discovering my true style. We loved it. But our renters did not. We moved and they decided to go for a more fleshy faux glazed color.

Luckily, we had the opportunity to remodel and spruce up our sweet kitchen before we moved back in this summer. And now she is EXACTLY what I wanted! She has new walls, paint and molding, new floors and trim, new counter tops and back splash, new appliances, a new sink and faucet! I am obsessed with the brown and tan zebra print fabric, and love the mix of it with the light blue toile. My chairs are from a dining set that belonged to my great-grandmother and I made them cute little plaid skirts. I love the pedestal table (just not the cheap top... on the hunt for a real solid wood one). We loved her before, but now she is juuuuuuust right!For more fun transformations- head over to Jen's