Kitchen Makeover

We are now 7 months in to our Colorado adventure.  Against popular advice to rent for a while before we settled down, we actually bought a home right away.  I was nervous about it, but so far it's been a good decision for our family.  For one thing, home prices have risen and it's a seller's market.  Every home that goes on the market in our neighborhood gets multiple offers on it within 24 hours well over asking price.  I don't think we'd own a home right now (or in the foreseeable future) if we hadn't bought when we did.  For another we love where we live and although everything was new to me 7 months ago, I'd pick the same exact neighborhood all over again.  I feel like we fit right in.  The neighborhood boasts a great mix of people from all life stages.  My kids have tons of little friends to run around with (most of which they go to school with as well).  We have several teenagers in our neighborhood as well who often babysit my kids.  We also have our very own stand in grandparents on our street.  Directly across the street form us is an huge open space with playgrounds, space for pups to run, biking trails, walking paths, and a breath taking view of the Rocky Mountains.   Without traffic, we're about 10 minutes to Boulder and 20 minutes to Denver with everything we need within walking/biking/quick-driving distance (walk to Starbucks, wahoo!). We have our own little utopia here. 

But I have linoleum floors.  I have brass fixtures that I will probably be replacing for the next 5 years.  I don't think our home had ever been painted ANY color.  Our home is actually smaller than we one we owned in TN.  All these issues are definitely first world problems, cosmetic, and things I could live with.  The attributes I listed above far outweigh the "outdated-ness" of our home.  No question.

Nevertheless, we slowly but surely have been working to update things in our home.  Lately we have had a big portion of the interior painted and new carpet installed (HALLELUJAH).  One project I'm particularly proud of is our kitchen.  It started off like this:

Then we replaced the appliances (which Tim swears were coated with grease) and changed out the knobs:

Now it looks like this! All done!

The changes between phase 2 and phase three were subtle, but paid off big (or so I think).  First I painted and distressed the cabinets with Annie Sloan "Old White.  We painted the kitchen and den a beautiful muted turquoise color.  I thought the cabinets looked way too stark white against it hence the Annie Sloan update. Here's a close up of the finished product.

Then we changed out two kitchen fixtures and added some accessories, and viola, we were done!

As a fun side project, we made the kids an art wall off the kitchen to display all their masterpieces.  I'm not really a fan of decals, but I made an exception here :)