Apparently, I Have No Pride

Or I would never publicly post photographic evidence of how we've been living these past couple of weeks. But first thing's first.  Here are the before shots.  We've been working on a cheap and dirty kitchen remodel.  We were originally going to just rip the whole thing out and start from scratch (except for our appliances) this summer, and we'd been saving up for that project.  But some issues have come up that have made the idea of spending a lot of money redoing a perfectly useful  (albeit old and a little crusty) kitchen more than a little unattractive.  So, we decided to see what we could do on the cheap.  We're lucky, because the layout works for us.  Here's the kitchen before.

We stripped the door frame a while ago but ran out of paint.  Our plans are to repaint all the trim, so we're actually a step ahead of the game there.

The refrigerator and range are fairly new, so those were always going to stay.  But that blond oak has been driving me batty for years.  And while I don't like the laminate floor, while we've been working on the house, it's been a godsend.  You can drip pain and stain on it and drag heavy pieces of furniture across it with no noticeable damage.  You can even take a scrubby pad and cleanser to it.  We'll be keeping this for a while longer and replace it when we're closer to wrapping up the entire downstairs.

Our current color scheme is orange and turquoise.  Honestly, the entire kitchen was turquoise when we bought the house.  Walls and countertops.  (Actually, we've since found that a lot of the house was turquoise before we bought it and the prior owners just did a sloppy "Designed to Sell" treatment before putting the house on the market, but that's another story.)  While I love blue, I couldn't cook in that. After much trial and error, orange was the only wall color that really worked with the existing countertop.  We're not orange anymore.

The dishwasher was the last appliance we replaced.  This is where the crusty comes in to play.  Oh, and that baseboard?  That's a plank from the laminate floor.  Like I said, sloppy "Designed to Sell."  And totally unnecessary.  We never thought we'd find a house that was decorated to our taste, and neither Mr. flyskim nor I is put off by wild paint colors or bad surfaces.

So, here's the new color scheme.  We're going with blue/green with ivory painted cabinets and a black laminate countertop.  We've already had that installed, and it really gives the look of soapstone.  We'll be tiling the backsplash with the above glass subway tiles.  And then there's the paint.  It's only partially done, but I think it's going to be wonderful.  I'll post the WIP pictures by the end of the week, but here's a sneak peek.

Not that this was an issue after painting our kitchen orange, but no one will be able to say we're afraid of color after this.  Pip is just thankful that it no longer looks like Halloween every time she walks into the room.