Painting the Kitchen

One of my goals for the year is to get some lighter paint on the walls of our main living areas. Our house is rocking some tiny windows (which is pretty typical of things built in 1970) and combined with the seven mature trees on our lot, it's a cave in here. Now that we've gotten our biggest projects out of the way--which were the basement, the leaky sunroom, and the cabinets--it's time to do something about these inherited paint colors. They're not hideous or anything, and maybe the previous owners wanted to embrace the darkness and be cozy, but I like things brighter.

So! Last week I busted out the same paint I used on the cabinets (Benjamin Moore Advance) and I went to town on the chair rail and bulkhead:

Imagine me squealing a little bit while I type. I made Hubsey look at all of the pictures I took, even though he lives in the house and can see this with his own eyeballs. I'm becoming That Parent who won't stop sharing pictures of their kids, except instead of kids it's my house. Anyway, I went with the Advance again because there was a bit left and I wanted to use it, but I also wanted everything to match the rest of the white trim. There are already enough neutrals going on down here, so keeping the whites consistent was the best move.

Let's look at some before and afters! Whee!

It's SO MUCH BRIGHTER. And without that dark brown on the bulkhead, the ceiling feels two feet higher in the cooking area. Behold:

We're thrilled with how it's coming together. For a while the basement has been the only spot in the house that feels 100% us, but now the kitchen is catching up. It's been extremely affordable to this point, too, because all we've done is paint the cabinets/chair rail/bulkhead, buy a rug, and switch the picture frames. We've only spent about $200, which is crazy because it looked like this the day we moved in:

I remember unpacking this room in the middle of the afternoon, and you can see how all of the brown just sucked the light right out of there. I'm so glad we painted those cabinets. (And everything else. Ha.)

Let's end on an after picture! You're lookin' mighty fine, kitchen. Mighty fine. Insert a saucy wink here.

Have you been wielding a paintbrush lately? Or doing other house-y projects? Anybody else doing battle with a weirdly dark room?