[ hello? and painting the kitchen ]

I KNOW, it's been ages since I've been here! Sorry for taking so long to get back to normal life ~ moving in has been busy and I've also tried to remind myself to enjoy some of this summer and not get completely obsessed about organizing and setting things up. Summer is ticking along and we've already had a bit of a nip in the air which has reminded me that fall is quickly approaching!

We're loving our new home and leafy neighbourhood ~ I honestly couldn't have asked for more and it has made all those expat years worth it {I feel truly blessed}.

This home has a lot of nice features but one of the things I only noticed once we moved in is how yellow the entire house is! The previous owners were obviously huge fans of yellow and the entire house is a mix of various shades of yellow. I'm not a big yellow fan {I had a huge overdose of it a few years ago when the home we bought was completely yellow and the office I worked in was also entirely yellow ~ I was surrounded by yellow 24 hours a day!} Needless to say, removing some of the yellow in this home is high on the to-do list!

Today I'm going to talk about undertones ~ those sneaky things that can make everything look like it blends beautifully together or looks just slightly off. Case in point: our kitchen...

kitchen before:

From what I could determine, the walls were painted in a colour similar to this:

{notice that the colour is a yellow with a bit of a peachy orange tone to it which picks up the tone of the wood floors and island}

Here is what the Corian countertops and backsplash tiles look like:

{notice that they have more of a pinky undertone similar to this colour...}

Here is how the countertop looks with the flooring...

Do you see where I'm going with this? Instead of everything blending beautifully together, we had an undertone situation happening. And the wall colour was accentuating the problem.

Time to paint!

I decided to go neutral and chose BM cc40 cloud white ~ almost exactly the cabinet colour...

 By eliminating that peach pie wall colour, it de-emphasized the clash of the undertones...

kitchen after:

I love the freshness of the warm white throughout the kitchen {I know, looking at colours on a computer isn't always accurate but hopefully you can see the improvement}. I find that it gives it a more current look and my eye doesn't immediately jump from the peachy walls to the backsplash tile. I'm sure replacing the backsplash tile is something we'll eventually do, but at least for now, I can live with it.

So that's one of the things I've tackled since we've moved in. There are so many more rooms I'd like to paint but will get to them one at a time. Now to sit out on the patio and enjoy some of this weather! Thanks for stopping by and for your patience!

lisa