Can't Commit

Guess what decision has been hanging over my head? The decision that has been turning me into an indecisive, commitment-phobic crazy person with eight-month-old paint samples still taped to my kitchen cabinets...

Yes, it's deciding on a colour to paint the kitchen cabinets. My first attempt that resulted in a colour I named "bleugh" leeched all of my colour-selecting confidence, and so the kitchen has remained (although I promise the benchtops aren't normally covered in junk, I was doing some reorganising when I took this shot).

What was that reorganising?

Well! When we moved the window on the west wall of our kitchen, we also put up more shelves where the window had been (in the left corner), to balance out the shelves on the other side of that wall. Thankfully we had the perfect number of brackets available, although we did have to cut two more shelf boards out of the leftover MDF from the original shelf project. As you can see, this process pre-dated our new benchtops.

And that's how that side of the kitchen remained, even while I put up the new trim across that top beam, the cornice and around the window. Inconveniently, I didn't really take any proper shots of that wall while displaying my fancy trimming skills, but you can see in this shot that the little angled ceiling above the shelves is definitely still unpainted, and I can assure you that all of the little spots I puttied along the wall behind the shelves were still unpainted as well.

So, we decided that it's about time we dealt with that. So I moved everything off the shelves (thus the cluttered benchtop on the other side of the room), and then removed the shelves themselves, leaving us with this very attractive situation.

How about a close-up of the ugliness?

Daniel got to work undercoating and painting the first coat. Already a dramatically better difference if you look at the formerly timber-coloured section on the left of the angled ceiling.

And I finished off the second coat of colour on the wall and ceiling. The trim's still unfortunately naked with splotches of putty over the screw holes, but I'll get to that soon.

It's this view of the other corner all painted and pretty that really made me think. See the sun streaming through the windows from the right, and gleaming against the light-coloured walls?

In fact, even without the wall properly painted, the difference between the shot with the shelves on the wall and the shot without is enormous. The kitchen feels so much lighter and brighter without those dark shelves on the wall!

So, I started thinking about the possibility of painting the shelves a lighter colour like the wall, instead of the still-yet-to-be-decided-upon darker grey for the lower cabinets. This wasn't a new idea for me, I'd even collected a few two-tone cabinet pictures months ago on Pinterest, but I'd never given it serious thought until now.

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Imagine if the shelf and plate racks in this shot were painted the same green as the lower cabinets. The room would look so much darker, instead of the light from the window bouncing around as it does.

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And then there's this gorgeous kitchen with higher contrast between the colours of the upper and lower cabinets, more like what we'd be doing.

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This is an example of a small kitchen benefiting from the light-coloured upper cabinets, although I can't say I'm a big fan of this one. I think it might be because the colour of the white upper cabinets doesn't seem to work well with the colour of the stone benchtop.

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And here again, it's very clear that the lighter upper cabinets aren't nearly as visually heavy as the darker lower cabinets, and they bounce the light around nicely.

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In a large kitchen like ours it's not essential to try to make it look larger, but even in this large kitchen, it's certainly effective at making the space feel bright and airy.

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This kitchen would be extremely dim if the upper cabinets were dark like the lower cabinets, and the benchtop ties them in nicely, so it doesn't look patchy.

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 OK! So I can at least come to the conclusion that this concept has worked well before.

Onto our kitchen! I have no doubt that painting the shelves a light colour on the window wall would look good. But my real worry is the other wall, with the fridge and pantry on it.

I couldn't imagine integrating the dark lower look and the light upper look with the pantry, which spans the two spaces, in a way that might actually look good.

So I decided to start playing around with the photos in an editing program, to trial a few different options. I started with the little microwave corner, testing it with a dark grey-ish colour along the lines of our various paint samples (although possibly a bit lighter than the direction I'm actually thinking of going with it).

And then with a lighter colour on the upper cabinets and shelves (although I think I made the colour a bit too close to the wall colour).

Not bad so far, but now onto the other side of the fridge, where the pantry is.

 

First, with the dark grey colour on the pantry and the glass-door cabinet above it.

And then with the upper cabinet in the lighter colour. And blackboard paint on the inset areas of the pantry doors, which is something I've been planning on doing for a while.

It was as I had feared. It kind of looks a bit strange. So I tried both the pantry and the higher cabinet in the light colour, with the inserts in the door still in the blackboard paint. Don't mind the strange black shading in the wall above, I had a bit of a mishap with the photo editing, and didn't want to have to start again.

So far, that option was my favourite. So I decided that I had to see how it looked with the cabinets on the other side of the fridge. It doesn't look fantastic, but if you imagine that the blackboard paint on the pantry doors isn't entirely jet black and the grey on the lower cabinets is a bit darker, I actually think it might look quite good.

I trawled through my photo collection and finally found a shot of the kitchen (taken pre-new-benchtops and pre-second-symmetrical-window) that actually gives us a peek at how the pantry looks in relation to the other cabinetry. I applied my extremely sloppy editing, and I think that may very well be the clincher. It should look pretty good with the two-tone look, shouldn't it?

Update: A friend suggested that it might be a good idea to try out the shot of the fridge side of the kitchen with the pantry in grey instead of white, to really be confident about what decision to make. Here goes!

What do you think? Opinions welcome!