i never do this (portrait of a kitchen)

My sister (The Nester) recently blogged about my kitchen redo. What a novel idea, thought I. Who doesn't love a good before and after? She often writes of window treatments and her love of fabric (that she has so graciously passed onto me). I don't usually write about this type of thing, but with it being my kitchen and all, I thought it could be fun to post some significant shots of it before the love and after the love. So here we go. This was our kitchen on move in day, August of 2005.Please notice the lovely shade of dark mauve under the chair rail. Oh, and the sponging. What self-respecting woman in the early 90's didn't love a good sponged wall?
The bones of this kitchen were great, I thought. It just needed a little love.
And love it we did. First, we painted the kitchen Ivoire from Sherwin Williams. Actually, first we replaced the stove, but that's not as fun to talk about. Then we lived with it for a while. I talked a lot with The Nester about what I wanted to do in the kitchen. She encouraged me to look through magazines and find photos of what I really liked, realistic or not. It helped to think this way and get a feel for what my likes are. Sometimes I have a hard time with that. Then, I found this, my inspiration photo:
It's actually an ad for that stuff that's on the ceiling, but I didn't care about that. I noticed that the walls were the same color as mine and those cabinets looked great! And it also made me want a dog. And a friend. And coffee. But whatever.

I knew we couldn't replace the cabinets, so I just had to choose what color I wanted them to be. I decided black was the only way to go. I also liked the fact that the black made our dishwasher disappear. So we hired a friend to do the dirty work (you didn't think I did this all myself, did you?) and off we went. We also replaced the sink and the countertops, which was by far our biggest expense. Add a subway tile backsplash and here is the final product.
And another one with my butcher block/island included.

Here is a close up of the window treatment. I picked out the fabric and The Nester helped me hang it. I'll let her reveal her secrets. Let me just say it cost $10.
I found these bubbled glass knobs at Anthropologie. Love. Them. Oh, and by the way, we do have a refrigerator. I just had no before shots from that angle so I didn't bother taking any after shots of it either. Incase you were wondering.

Let's see that one more time, shall we?
We do have to replace our off white outlets with white ones, but other than that, we're pretty much finished. Now if we only had a dog...