Before and After: 70s Kitchen Remodel

Before: Peninsula Separating Kitchen from Great Room

When you picture a home in the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, you might imagine rustic spaces, a roaring fire and cozy furniture. Well this house was so not that! The previous owners seemed to think they were in Palm Beach.  Lily Pulitzer pinks, lime green and yellow were everywhere!  This 70's era home needed a serious facelift.  It was a close contest, but I think the award for the ugliest room in the house had to go to the kitchen.

Before: Looking Into Kitchen

Before: Original Cabinetry and Appliances

The kitchen was terrible. When I say terrible, you’d better believe it was awful. Bright yellow and brown cabinetry, mismatched appliances, orange-hued pine paneling, closed in corners, wavy vinyl floors, yuck! And even though the space is right off of the main living area, upper cabinets and a single opening, made the kitchen feel closed off and separate from the rest of the house. We immediately went to work (or my contractor did), gutting the whole kitchen.  We planned on opening up the space by getting rid of some upper cabinets and adding an island.  This gave us a nice "U" shaped layout and good flow.  To save on costs, we kept appliances in their original places, adding a vented hood over the stove and tucking the microwave into the new island. We also gained a nice bar area for casual dining.

Midway

I love color, it’s true, but yellow was not doing it for me, and while the overall color scheme for the house is blue and green with touches of brown, I decided that this room needed to be bright so that meant white.  All white cabinetry is a classic, and quartz countertops with a soft gray limestone look gives a little contrast.  The gray tones look great with the new stainless appliances and relate to the gray stone fireplace in the adjacent space.  We eliminated the paneling on the walls and added a wood plank ceiling for warmth.  The wood ceiling continues into the adjacent space which visually ties the spaces together.

Almost There!

Finally, we added our color with pops of blue on the countertops, pretty accessories, and cookbooks in the built ins. The wrought iron lights and bronze finish on the hardware bring a touch of that rusticity that seems so suited to a mountain home. A pretty curtain for the window will be the finishing touch. Quite a transformation!

After: The new brighter, more welcoming space.