House tour: Eat-in kitchen

Next up in our house tour is the eat-in kitchen.  Last week I showed you our living room and I loved all the feedback and advice you gave me!   And I am glad you are enjoying this home tour.  Our living room opens up to the kitchen and an eat-in kitchen area.  I am thankful for this area in our home as it is used constantly – more than our dining room.

You can see here how it is open into the living room.  We loved this about our house when we first saw it – the open floor plan.

Unlike the living room, this room has undergone quite a before and after transition.

This was the way it looked a few years into us living here.  We had painted before we moved in so that was there from the beginning.  We put in new carpet also when we bought the house but didn’t do anything to the kitchen linoleum.

After living here about 5 years, we had ceramic tile installed in the kitchen, I did one of my first big DIY projects and installed a chair rail in here and painted the bottom part of the wall a light green.

Oh, and you can’t see the light in the first picture but it was horrible.  That was also replaced with this prettier chandelier.

We also bought a new butcher block table and chairs set off Craigslist for $125 and sold our old one for $75 so were only out $50 which is a great deal for a solid wood pedestal table and chair set.  It only came with 4 chairs but I found 1 chair on the side of the road and another 1 at Goodwill for $5 so we have 6 chairs now.

But the curtains were just thrown up there and the room lacked any décor.

A year or so later, I realized the green was just not working.  If you read my blog regularly you know I love to change up my placemats and table décor seasonally and the green just wasn’t working with that.  So I decided to go with something a little more neutral and painted a medium brown color on the bottom.   This medium brown color (a custom color) is also the same brown I used for my DIY painted curtains in the living room.  I also finally got some pretty curtains and decorated the room.

Here is how it sits today.

The sheers are from Kohl’s bought on deep discount just tied back with ribbon

Sneak peak of a Valentine’s tablescape I may share later on the blog.

Now for the things I love and the things I want to change.

Things I love:

• I love the color scheme of the different browns in the wall color.  It is neutral without being boring.  I also enjoy the pops of red in the “EAT letters” (tutorial here for those) and the red dishes displayed in the cabinets.  (More on those open doors in the next week’s post on the kitchen
• I am very happy with the tile in the kitchen although I still need to find a way to clean my grout.
• I enjoy the white sheer curtains but also have something I want to change about them
• And I am happy with the décor in here for now.  It is simple and I don’t have much wall space but it works.

Things I want to change:

• remove this rack of cookbooks.  I need to find another place for them but don’t have anywhere right now.  But that is first up on my list to do.  I can’t stand how cluttered it looks, but I do use a lot of the cookbooks.
• refinish the table and chairs.  It was in good shape when we bought it but it could use some touching up.  I would LOVE to refinish the butcher block table and chair seats to a deep walnut brown and then would just repaint the white part white.
• The curtains – I want to raise the curtain rods but the curtains are too short for that.  Not sure if I could take the hem out to make them longer or I could possibly replace them with some cheap sheers from IKEA.
• And I need to clean and re-seal the grout once I find something that works.

But for now, this room is pretty much on my DONE list.

Do you have an eat-in kitchen – how do you use it or decorate it?