House Plans: Kitchen Edition

For as long as I can remember, I have loved all things house related. When I was a kid, sometimes we would walk through model homes for fun and I think perhaps that is where I got the house "bug". This love plays out in several ways: I love looking at real estate listings for instance (even though we are absolutely not in the market for a new home). I might as well subscribe to Better Homes and Gardens  and Southern Living because the pretty pictures on the front covers get me nearly every time at the grocery store. You get the idea.

Obviously the biggest way that this all plays out is in my own home. There is just one problem...wait, make that two problems. One, I do not consider myself to be very savvy when it comes to decorating. I can show you a million ideas that I love, but I am very bad at pulling those ideas together and implementing them in a way that I love in my own home. The second problem is that I may be one of the most indecisive people EVER and my tastes are evolving constantly. I second guess myself in many areas of life and decorating our home is one of those areas. I think part of the problem is I want everyone else to like my design decisions as much as I do. Yeah, I know, it's silly.

Anyways, I have BIG ideas for a lot of the spaces in our home and I thought it might be fun to share those plans and ideas with you periodically. Now, 95% of these ideas may never be implemented, but I still find it fun to dream. Also, these are mostly my ideas. Just because I want to do something, doesn't mean Adam necessarily agrees and I prefer to only implement ideas that we are both on board with.

So let's start with the area that is truly the heart of our home: our kitchen and eating area.

(Please pardon the Pampers box and the stack of mail on the island)

I love how our kitchen is open to the rest of our downstairs, especially our family room. It is a great kitchen with tons of counter space and cabinets. I'm not complaining - at all! BUT - I do have a laundry list of things I would love to do in this space. Only one of those things is a big ticket item and the rest are smaller, less budget busting ideas (I think). So let's get these bullet points started...

• Replace ceramic floors with hardwood to match the foyer/dining room area. Adam totally disagrees with me on this one, but I do not love our ceramic. Total error in judgement on my part when we built this house. I think the ceramic is very hard to keep clean, at least for our family. I think having hardwood in our entire downstairs would be awesome. And just in case it isn't obvious, this is the (chah-ching) big ticket item.

This is what it looks like where our foyer meets our family room (carpet) and our kitchen (ceramic). I'm not a fan. Wouldn't hardwood throughout be dreamy?!?

• Put crown molding throughout (the whole downstairs actually) and add trim around all of the windows.
• If and only if we put hardwoods in the kitchen at some point, I will strongly consider painting the island a lighter color. We do not get a ton of direct sunlight in the actual kitchen so I think painting the island would help keep things brighter since our existing hardwoods are darker and our cabinets are darker. In our eating area (the red room) we could have added two more windows where you see those 6 pictures hanging, but decided against it because we weren't sure if we were going to put a piece of furniture there at some point down the road. This is one of my only major "structural" regrets of our building process. Now I crave the afternoon sunlight we would have gotten through those windows. Oh well!
• If I paint the island at some point I would also like to add beadboard or something of the sort to the back of our island. Two reasons: added character and in order to cover up the cheap faux wood on the back of the island. It drives me nuts!
• Add a backsplash in the kitchen. We are actually considering tackling this project this fall. Can anyone spy the tile samples I have out in one of the pictures above? Oh, and when I say we will be "tackling" this project I mean I will punch the numbers on my phone with zest while calling a professional to get the job done.
• Add window treatments in the eating area. This is where me being indecisive is a huge issue. I think it will take me about 10 years to pick out window treatments that I like, want to spend money on, and am willing to live with for an extended period of time.

• Finally, this is the part where my mom and my sister want to kill me and wholeheartedly disagree with me. And I must say, my father-in-law did an amazing job helping us paint our eating area. This area has a vaulted ceiling and I wanted to have a color that would have some impact and this rusty red color certainly does. It is warm and inviting and I really like it. Here it comes...BUT...I really like color and I really like being able to experiment with color and this red limits me big time. If I see a really fun tablecloth of a set of placemats that have blues/greens/teal in them, I am out of luck because they would clash big time with this paint color. I am pretty much limited to creams/whites, reds, oranges, and yellows. This is great during Thanksgiving and Christmas, but come spring and summer I always want to branch out a little. The only way I would ever consider painting this room is if we put down hardwood. Otherwise the room has little warmth due to the cool tones in the ceramic.
• Oh, and I am currently on the lookout for a rug for our eating area but just haven't found the one yet.

So there you have it. Isn't dreaming fun?!?! If we don't do any of the things on this list, our kitchen will still be great. My wheels are always turning though! I'm not sure when or which space I will review next but I thought our kitchen would be a fun place to start. Am I crazy for wanting to put down hardwood? Am I even crazier for considering painting the eating area again? Adam will gladly answer both of those questions for you...ha!