White kitchen shelves.

We are in full swing in our house trying to get to as many rooms as possible painted before the bubs arrived. There's still over 2 months but high on the list is the kitchen/lounge area and main bedroom. We can always paint the craft room, guest room and library later on but these rooms are used so much and really need some painting. Our kitchen is pretty average. It's not so awful that it needed to be gutted but it wasn't really my style. We also bought a kitchen dresser as we needed more storage. The kitchen layout actually functions well, especially as the kitchen, lounge and dining room as all one very large room. When we moved in we also installed a dishwasher, a knife holder and removed a hanging wooden shelf above the bar.
However for the last four months we haven't added any paint to the walls (as I add that up I'm like wow have we been here four months already!) and I just felt that some white might brighten the kitchen up for the time being and make it feel a little fresher and cleaner.

Before. In this photo husband is removing the final part of a wooden bar shelf.

Time and money means that we aren't really able to tackle other things we'd like to do in the kitchen but they will happen over time once we save a bit.

-We like the existing design but would like to extend the kitchen island.

-New grey, wooden or white benchtops. 

-A new stove

-Paint the cupboards (white or possibility grey)

-Add some subway tiles.

-Replace existing fans with something a bit more modern.

Back to the shelves. I needed to remove them to paint it was too awkward painting them while they were up. Once the shelves had been removed the walls were given an undercoat and two coats of antique white USA paint....goodbye peachy walls.
The shelves were painted outside with two coats of an aqua enamel (so they shouldn't chip easily before being placed back. Once they were up, the whole kitchen just looked more open and fresh.
It was time to replace some of the items. While in the above photo you can see many brightly coloured utensils and cooking items, I decided to restrict my colour scheme to yellow, black and white and see how this would work in the space. I could have chosen any other colour apart from yellow but it's just such a bright happy colour and I own a bit of yellow kitchen gear. The other kitchen items were just packed away into the cupboards and no longer on display.

We also moved the kitchen dresser (pictured next to the fridge in the before photo) to another wall. I kept the same white, black, yellow colour scheme going with the dresser and have decided to turn the area next to the fridge into a little office nook (more info to come). I love having the restricted colour palette for display items but may need to thrift/buy a few more items to finish off the shelves and give them a slightly fuller look. There are a few other small inexpensive changes happening in the kitchen too which I'll share soon which should make the room even nicer as we save for a one day phase 2 makeover.
Now just to wait a few more hours for my slow cooker lamb stew to be ready :)

Lisa x