Open house: my updated kitchen

It's been a long time since I've shared a peek inside my home, hasn't it? But today I'm excited to invite you into one of my favorite spaces in this house: my new kitchen!

To give a feel for how much this kitchen has changed over the years, here's a look back.

Kitchen in 2010:

The cupboards are wonderful quality, but the kitchen feels like a sea of brown. So here it is in 2014:

I was very happy with these updates, especially the transformation of the island. But over time, the cabinets sustained some water damage, like this:

I knew that this damage had to be repaired, but it took me a long time to decide what to do.

Finally I consulted two friends: one who has remodeled four kitchens for herself and one who is a top-notch local realtor. Both of them advised having the cabinets painted.

To be honest, our granite countertops are not my favorite. I love the sleek, clean look of marble or quartz. But the countertops are in great shape, and the same granite is still being used in kitchen construction. "Your granite is fine," pronounced my realtor friend. And my friend with kitchen remodeling experience suggested that I start with painting the cupboards and just see how I felt once that was done. "You might find that the painted cabinets give you a whole new kitchen," she advised. She was right!

Everything feels so much lighter and brighter now!

Besides painting the cupboards, I made a few other changes as well—some complicated, some simple. Perhaps the most complicated was having the range hood altered. Here's how the old hood looked:

It was a custom-made hood, but I didn't really like the trim work, and the edges were so sharp! (Just ask my husband and two of my sons, all of whom are over 6'6" tall.) With some carpentry and painting magic, here's the hood now:

I considered replacing the range hood with a stainless steel one, but the cost was crazy expensive, in my opinion. So I looked for inspiration online, and found a hood I liked at Home Stories A to Z (Beth's kitchen is simply gorgeous!).

Another big change was the lighting in the room. I swapped out the three small lights over the island for two large lanterns:

I also changed the chandelier over the table:

The other changes were smaller. I swapped out the drawer pulls, but re-used the knobs, sticking with oil-rubbed bronze because it works well with the granite.

I wanted to add some blue to the room to work well with the blue in the adjacent dining room, so I got a new rug:

painted a terra cotta pot navy blue and gold:

and added a small lamp to the serving area.

I also wanted to add some blue to the window treatment. I still love my DIY Roman shade (full tutorial here), so I just painted over some of the green stripes with blue paint. Presto!

Here's a look behind the scenes of the cabinet painting process:

After removing all the cabinet doors and drawers to be taken to the shop, the painters taped off and tented the area. They removed the old finish, sprayed on a primer, then patched every visible imperfection.

Then they sprayed on two coats of the white paint I chose ("Alabaster" from General Finishes).

After seeing these guys work, I was filled with admiration for people who paint their cabinets themselves! 

All in all, I'm very pleased with our updated space. It's so clean, light, and bright. I'm glad I took my friends' advice. I do feel like I have a whole new kitchen!

Sources (no affiliation):

Island lanterns: Birch Lane Heritage, Wayfair

Chandelier: Laurel Foundry Carmen, Wayfair

Cabinet pulls: Emtek Westwood, build.com

Rug: Mistana Hillsby, Wayfair

What do you think?

I'm joining
Marty for Inspire Me Tuesday
Beth for Tutorials and Tips

My home at Christmas

Christmas is around the corner, and we've finally finished decking the halls around here, so I'm happy to welcome you to our home. Just a word of warning: our Christmas decor is very traditional, so I hope you like red and green!

Here's the outside of our house this year:

Here's the scene at the front door:

I made that "JOY" sign a few years ago (click here for easy directions to make your own), and I love hanging it up at Christmastime.

The front porch seating area is a favorite spot to decorate:

We never know what the weather is going to be like in December. Last week was freezing cold, but yesterday it was warm enough to sit out here!

When you come in the front door, here's the scene that greets you:

The first room on your right is the dining room, where I add just a few Christmasy touches.

This room is full of furniture that belonged to my mother. She loved "The Twelve Days of Christmas," and I have fun hanging twelve special ornaments in the window in her memory.

The Nativity scenes on the sideboard are special to me. The plate is from El Salvador, a gift from my sister from her missions work there. And the little wooden creche is from Israel; it was made of olive wood.

The sideboard in the dining room holds three Lenox "Trees Around the World" plates—one from each of the years that our sons were born. I pack these away very carefully each year!

Now into the living room, which is the hub of our Christmas activities. We have just one tree in the house, which stands in the corner of this big room. You can see more photos of the tree here.

At the other end of the room are the fireplace and the television. The TV can be shut away in a cabinet, but I left it out for these photos. You can see the stack of Christmas movies just waiting to be watched.

A doorway from the living room leads into the kitchen, where I have a few of my favorite Christmas things.

I made the NOEL sign in the window; click here for a super-easy tutorial. The green island is fun all the time, but it works especially well at Christmas. I love having a "variety store" vignette on it at Christmastime:

The old wrapping paper cutter works beautifully. And the candy scale is just like the one at Heckerman's Variety Store in Belle Plaine, Kansas, where my grandmother lived. How I loved going there and buying a bag of candy for a few cents!

The breakfast area holds our big table and my mother's dough cabinet. The table holds a simple centerpiece that we can easily whisk to the side, and the dough cabinet holds my old Department 56 village.

Our little beagle is 14 years old now, so you can often find her snuggled up here.

The breakfast room leads out to the screened porch, where I've added just a few Christmas things this year:

I hope you've enjoyed this look around our home. I wish you could come for a real visit!

In this holy season, I wish you and your loved ones every blessing as you celebrate the fact that God is with us.

Fall Home Tour

Oh, y'all, it's finally Fall in North Carolina. We're all breathing a sigh of relief as our scorching temperatures have relented at last. And now that the season is officially here, I'd like to welcome you to my home.

First, a disclaimer. Lots of bloggers are brilliant at staging their homes for beautiful photos, and I know we all admire and appreciate their work. Alas, staging is not one of my talents. So these are just photos of the way I have my home decorated for Autumn.

Here's our house in Durham.

We're blessed to live in a relatively new house in an old, established neighborhood. The mature trees are great friends of mine. As you can see, the leaves haven't really started changing colors yet.

Here's the view as you approach the front door.

And a closer look at the area around the door.

That's a tobacco basket tucked in the corner, a nod to North Carolina's biggest crop.

This year I'm trying something a little different in place of a wreath. It's a copper bucket filled with dried and silk flowers and wheat. I'm not sure if I like it as well as a wreath; what do you think?

To the right of the front door is the front porch sitting area, which is one of my favorite rooms in our house. I've added a few fall touches here.

I just slipcovered my usual throw pillows with some autumnal fabric and added a few pumpkins and some cotton. Our families are from Tennessee and Arkansas, and cotton is a huge part of our family history: my grandfather was a sharecropper, my husband's grandfather was a tenant farmer, and my husband's father ran a cotton gin. So when I think of harvest, cotton is the first thing that comes to mind.

An heirloom pumpkin anchors this end of the sitting area, along with a Fall message on the chalkboard.

The room on the inside of the front porch windows is our dining room, which is decorated very simply for Fall.

I made this dried arrangement a few years ago, and I still like it in this room.

Just beside the dining room is the living room. The colors in this room lend themselves well to some fall decorating.

The wingback chairs are pair nicely with these Pottery Barn fall pillows.

The sofas got some new pillows this Fall, too—I found some Pottery Barn napkins I loved and sewed them into pillow fronts. So easy!

The coffee table usually holds a bowl of green apples, so that works great for Fall. I also add a little touch of the season on the magazine tray.

I don't usually do mantelscapes for the seasons other than Christmas, but I was tickled to find a huge copper tub while antiquing in Blowing Rock, and I thought it added a nice touch of Fall to the fireplace.

Doesn't it look pretty holding grocery store mums?

The living room leads into the kitchen, where just a few touches add some Fall flair. I wish you could smell my kitchen right now: I just baked a batch of pumpkin bread, which is my very favorite of all autumn treats (click here to get that recipe!).

 I'm still loving my green island!

The same antique mall in Blowing Rock yielded this wonderful candy scale, just like I remember from my childhood!

I found these dessert plates at Pottery Barn. They came in a set of four, and I hung three here.

Want to see my high-class method of hanging plates? I glue the pop-tops from Coke cans onto the back!

My mother's dough cabinet stands in our breakfast area and is one of my favorite pieces of furniture. This year it's decorated very simply for Fall.

At the end of the kitchen is the door to the screened porch.

The porch is on the second floor of the house, so sitting here is like being in a tree house. Soon the backdrop will be full of vibrant color. For now, we'll enjoy the color in the pumpkins and gourds of my simple centerpiece.

You know, with all the horrible news these days, it's easy to feel that such things as seasonal decorating is trite or even meaningless, but I don't think that's true. God has given us a beautiful world to live in. The actions of evil people may mar the picture, but they don't change the fact that God loves beauty. God created us to love beauty, too, and to join his work to make this world a lovely, flourishing place.

I like to think of my efforts to create a welcoming home as an offering of love, a small act of defiance in the face of evil. What do you think?

I'm joining these wonderful parties:

The Scoop 

Inspire Me Tuesday at A Stroll Thru Life

Wow Us Wednesday at Savvy Southern Style