The Kitchen: HGTV in the house!

About four years ago, someone in A.’s office saw a notice that HGTV was going to be in town and was looking for people to be part of a new show called “Look What I Did!” To qualify, you needed to have done work to your house without help from a contractor or other professional. On a whim, A. sent them some pictures of some of our projects, and surprisingly, they found ours interesting enough to make the cut.

One day, their crew showed up at our house and filmed us chattering on and on about our kitchen. They played up a reference to our honeymoon in Italy, but that wasn’t really an inspiration for the kitchen re-do. I think it was another HGTV show where we saw someone doing a textural wall treatment with tissue paper that spurred on our remodel. Even though we didn’t move walls, add appliances or get new furniture, our kitchen changed quite dramatically. When we moved in, the kitchen had:

• Gray indoor/outdoor carpeting
• Pink and blue patterned wallpaper with blue trim
• A plastic tile backsplash painted blue
• A weird, warped, some-sort-of-laminate countertop that was dark yellow and sparkly

Sick! It was really gross.

So, we pulled up the carpet and laid brown and cream square tiles in a checkerboard pattern, took down the wallpaper and put up a tissue paper texture that we then painted with two tones of yellow, painted all the trim white, put in John Boos rock maple counter tops and a painted tin tile backsplash.

We also took the doors off the cabinets and painted the insides of the cabinets and the shelves bright blue. I love the open shelving; it’s so handy. All of our cabinets were open for a time, until our dog got wise to the possibility and started stealing food out of them. Sheesh. A. made great glass-front doors to protect our food. Now she just waits until we’re cooking and jumps up on the counter to nab our mise en place. That’s why we call her the counter-terrorist.

We need to work on scanning in some other “before” photos. It’s amazing to see the difference. We’re also working on converting our HGTV spot from VHS to be able to post it. We’re still surprised it didn’t win an Emmy.

Plastic tile ... classy!

Work clothes - ready to go. Note the indoor/outdoor carpet. Nice!

Progress.

Tin tile, maple counters and a Chicago Faucets, well, faucet.

Entering the butler's pantry. Our butler spends a lot of time in here.

If your walls had this much depth and texture, you'd be happy too.

L's favorite breakfast spot--next to the heater!

A fun and functional project. A scrap piece of countertop works perfectly on a base we made from galvanized pipe. Perfect for prepping a morning coffee..