A Perfect Kitchen Color

This week on LTC we are sharing some of our home solutions. I chose to share one of the most recent changes in our home, one which is fairly simple, but a good example of how finding a wall color that’s just right can make such a huge difference in a space.

In our old house, we painted the feature wall of our kitchen a soft buttery yellow color and I absolutely loved it. Everything else in the kitchen was white, and at the time I didn’t know how that played into my love of the kitchen, until now. We had a white ceiling, floors, appliances, and the other 3 walls were white. We had dark brown cabinets on one of the walls, but other than that, the whole room was filled with a soft light glow, especially in the morning and evening when the light was coming in from different angles. I always smiled as soon as I walked in that room. So when we decided to paint this house, I took a similar approach, not taking into account any other factors in my decision other than having loved my old yellow kitchen.

And I ended up with this. In this house, my kitchen is filled with beautiful maple colored cabinets and drawers. Pretty much from the top to the bottom I have a warm orange-y brown color.

In our dining nook, our table also has a walnut colored finish, and our sliding doors are covered by a dark brown curtain, which was specifically chosen to give us a bit of privacy, but also allow us to see the backyard through the curtain, so that we could enjoy the great scenery that we lucked into when we bought this house.

The sun sets on this side of the house, which is beautiful, but the light that it gives to that room combined with all of the yellow and brown adds up to a room that is dark, full of orange light, and I just hated it. Also, I have been trying unsuccessfully to decorate this room ever since we moved in, but every time that I hold something up against the walls, it just doesn’t look right with the yellow and ends up somewhere else.

I knew what color I wanted on the walls instead, something that would compliment the cabinets better and bring down the orange-y yellow factor a ton: a nice cool grey blue. We went to the wall with a few paint samples and were really surprised by results. In the picture below, the 2 colors on the left are the exact same colors that are beside them on the white! Don’t they look so different? (Just say yes, and appease me, please.) I couldn’t believe when I first painted them how periwinkle colored they looked! A friend came by and commented, “Yep, the yellow just completely sucks the grey out of those colors.” (That yellow paint, it does stuff like that.) Luckily we tried the colors on white, were able to get a better idea of what the color would look like, and picked a good one.

So we painted the kitchen, and now it is beautiful. It’s crazy how finding just the right color can completely transform a room. It is now a perfect, airy, cool blue.

I keep just walking into the room and smiling.

I don’t even mind that it is barely decorated, having a good color is decoration enough for now.

That said, I am enjoying filling it little by little. Before, none of the “accessories” in the house looked good in that room, but now they all do. After the room was reassembled, I just went around the house picking up my favorite items, bringing them into the kitchen and smiling at how lovely they all looked in the new light.

Ahhhhhhhh. Also, the color is Pelican by Olympus, which I got at Lowes.

I feel like I should point out that, for the purpose of these pictures, the room has been moderately to heavily staged, and many items were removed.

This was such a simple solution, only cost me the price of a gallon of paint, and has brought a nice tranquility to our kitchen (which we need with an almost-two year old running around.) I hope you like it as much as I do! Though I would happily welcome suggestions on decorating the top of those cabinets...

Have a great week!