Face-Lift

No, I'm not getting a face-lift, but my kitchen is! After we finished our big construction project last year, we realized that the rest of our house looks rather shabby.....NOT shabby-chic! It's taken us awhile, but we're finally giving our little kitchen a cosmetic face-lift. Of course, I'd like to take a sledge hammer to the entire kitchen and replace the cabinets, counters, flooring, etc., but for a less expensive make-over, we're painting and re-decorating the area. After acquiring a newish refrigerator and moving it into the back porch, we now have room in the kitchen for more counter space.

We zoomed to Ikea in Burbank over the weekend and looked for a free-standing kitchen cabinet with drawers that is the same height as our existing kitchen counter. This new cabinet will fit between the counter and the stove. We'd seen a few in the Ikea catalog with stainless steel drawers and butcher block tops, in addition to other kitchen styles.

Butcher Block Top w/Stainless Steel Drawers

None of these really fit with our 1928 kitchen. We wandered around a bit more and found ourselves in the bedroom furniture section of the store. There it was....standing in front of me! We bought a 3-drawer dresser/bureau in a tomato soup red/orange color! It's exactly the same height as the kitchen counter.

Our new Kitchen CabinetAssemblage

After assembling the cabinet, Larry has decided to beef-up the structure of the cabinet to accommodate heavy pots and pans. He's also going to add a stainless-steel veneer to the top of the piece to make it safer for hot kitchen items.

I love this cabinet. The color works in every room of our house. We're going to paint the walls and cabinets a soft green color to go with the tile trim. Other areas will be bright white. All of the accent colors in the curtains, table cloth, etc. will be reddish orange. I'm using the photos below as inspiration. This kitchen from "The Kitchen" blog is light aqua with red cabinets and accessories and a touch of black and white to set everything off.

Matt's & Blair's Retro Kitchen, East Tulane, Ohio

Who knows? After living with our orange cabinet, maybe we'll paint all of the cabinets orange! I'm thinking that the green will be easier to live with though. We'll see....it's a process. Soon, I hope we will have our Matisse and/or Van Gogh kitchen!

"The Red Room" by Matisse

"Van Gogh's Kitchen" by Lori Skoumal Reeves