Welcome to the next room in Home Sweet Home: The Living Room! Read each of the rooms below (links updated as I post):
- The original Home Sweet Home post
- Welcome to our Home Sweet Home
- The Living Room
- The Kitchen
- The Hallway
- The Bathroom
- The Laundry
- James’ Area
- Violet’s Vanity Area
- The Bedroom
- What have we learned?
Before and after:
My kitchen today is light, follows my pink and green colour scheme and has some actual form of organisation!
Looking at the kitchen the way it used to be makes me cringe. I can’t believe it used to be so messy >_< We kept a lot of food here considering it was an apartment, the stupid thing being that it wasn’t stuff we needed. Most of the things that were on these shelves were there because we impulse bought or we had several half finished packets of things. It wasn’t needed!
Photo spam:
Starting with a shot of the whole kitchen/lounge area to get an idea of space. You’ll notice the sleepy puppy in the kitchen now haha!
The kitchen is very standard for an apartment this size. I’m very glad there’s an oven and dishwasher though as I saw quite a few that didn’t come with them.
The bench has my favorite change: the covered backsplash. I am planning to change that out for a green one a bit later though as I think the stripes aren’t exactly what I envisioned.
On the right side the appliances are now organised. I made a hanging hook thing to get some of the stuff off the bench. I love the idea of hanging hooks and being able to put things up and away because the space up there is pretty useless otherwise.
On the other side I created a little matching system of drawers in pink/green and stacked our other things over the top. I’ll be moving the hot chocolate etc into matching containers eventually so it will be even more matchy.
I think it’s the smaller details that really made the kitchen. Having everything in similar colours and with similar patterns really made a big difference visually.
The kitchen is a fairly functional place but having small decorated touches doesn’t take away from the functionality, it makes me very happy.
Background information:
When we moved here we saw the kitchen and lack of storage space and thought “Pft, who cares, we’ll eat out all the time and we’ll drop by the grocery store every few days”. Did that happen? No. We did exactly what we previously did and shopped every few weeks and had no money to eat take away >_< Going to the grocery store? Pft no, we order online now and just pick up little things at the store when needed. So that’s how we somehow ended up with all of this crap. Our kitchen appliances and things didn’t fit anywhere either. This place had minimum bench space so it’s impossible to keep many appliances, the lack of actual storage space means you can’t even really keep them in the cupboards because they’re very thin. When we started here we didn’t have a proper fridge, just a mini fridge so it made things easier as the space where the fridge was could be used for extra appliances. The kitchen was one of my hardest areas to redecorate because no matter how I organised things the gigantic blue backsplash still wasn’t the right colour to go with what I wanted. It was the last thing I put in here and it really changed the look. This area is the place which still needs the most work but it’s stuff which will gradually be replaced and changed.
Changes made:
- Removed 2 sets of shelves
- Added coloured backsplash
- Made mini shelves for bench storage
- White board for fridge
- Reorganised benches and cupboards
- Started replacing broken things like crockery with the correct colours (green and pink)
Still to be done:
- Possibly replace pink backsplash with a green one
- Replace the rest of the appliances/crockery/cutlery so they all match
- Do something about ugly black bench
Final thoughts: We rent so there’s only so much I can do in areas which have been already decorated. When I own the house I’ll be doing bigger things like repainting or adding new backslashes but for now I’ve made a big enough difference to be happy with the kitchen. I don’t spend as much time in here as I want to (James does all the cooking) but as I spend more time baking, I find the changes are making it more enjoyable. I actually like being in the kitchen baking now… that can only mean good things as it makes me want to bake more 😀
Bonus progress photos: The Home Sweet Home page from my diary that I never actually posted.
With all of the cupboards open. The one above the rangehood is only a few inches deep so you can only keep spices there. The one next to it has blocks of wood drilled in so plates can only be a certain width. The one below the sink has a bunch of piping for the dishwasher so it’s very thin too. I think whoever designed this storage had never actually lived in a house before, don’t even get me started on the bedroom cupboards!! 
These were the shelves we originally had in here, the white one on the right slides into the wall (super unhelpful) and is built in. The middle one was completely falling apart so I repaired it and gave it to James for his photography stuff. The black one was repurposed for our clothes.
It’s a bit ridiculous that I managed to fit everything from the two left shelves on to the the right one with some organisation and actually chucking out things which I shouldn’t have been keeping.
Make sure you come back tomorrow for the next instalment: the hallway!
