You guys! We are SO close to being finished with this kitchen progress. I still have to add some details, such as the shelving on either side of the window, a door knob to the playroom, caulking in some places, and a shade for the window. But look! It looks so close to my final vision!

I wanted to share some special details about the nitty gritty stuff today. Things like, how I hid a wall switch inside a 2×10 board of my shelving wall, what kind of switches and outlets I’ve used, and how I patched the texture of my ceiling where we installed two hanging pendants.

Now, let’s play a little game. It’s called spot the outlets. I have four outlets and two switches on the kitchen window wall, and am so pleased with how they fade away without making a visual statement at all. I used Legrand’s Radiant line of switches and outlets, and their wall plates are actually screw-free, so they look very minimal— to the point where you really have to look for them in photos. A blogger’s dream.

Replacing my outlets and switches wasn’t even on my radar when I began this process, but when all of the newer elements began to replace the old, I realized how dingy and outdated all of the old electrical fixtures looked by comparison. I’m so glad we replaced everything— these are the little things that make a big difference!

We also utilized some specialty items in the Legrand Radiant line, like outlets that have 3-setting nightlights which you can set to automatically turn on in dim lighting, wall chargers, and synced master/remote dimmer switches.

When I planned the shelving wall in the kitchen, I realized that I would be building shelves around the switches for the kitchen lights, which meant we would’ve had to reach our hands inside the shelves to turn on the light! Not a great idea. My dad recommended I use a shallow electrical box (like this one) and router a space for it on the outside of the shelf. Genius! He drilled a hole through the back of the shelf for the wires to enter the routered section, and now it looks like there is some kind of magic electrical situation going on. We covered the old box with a blank cover plate.

As we’ve been finishing up the details of the kitchen, I realized I need to make up my mind about a few final details. I decided to upgrade my door knob selection, and possibly my island stools as well. What do you guys think? I ordered an Emtek knob set for the playroom door and one for the pantry (pantry not shown in these photos), and I think the crystal and tumbled white bronze tie in well with the sophisticated feeling of my appliances and lighting, but also mimic the shape and style of my simple, modern wooden knobs. I also decided to do a white linen relaxed roman shade over the window, and got a few great baskets to put on my shelving wall. Still haven’t made my mind up about the stools though. Decisions, decisions! 

1. Emtek tumbled white bronze and crystal passage knob set
2. Xinh and Co Caña Baskets
3. Relaxed roman shade
4. Wooden cabinet knobs
5. 24″ wooden counter stools

Just for fun, I had to share a before and after— well, before and during picture! It’s from a slightly different angle, but when you’re taking before pictures of a space you’ve never photographed before, it can be difficult to know what the sweet spots will be for taking after photos. Oh well!

I’ll share more photos of the shelving wall and other details as I begin to share more posts on the kitchen project at A Beautiful Mess. But for now, check out my post on how I built the hood vent and also my post about painting wood cabinets with chalk paint vs. latex paint.

MATERIAL SOURCES

Wall paint: Benjamin Moore’s Super White
Cabinet paint: Annie Sloan’s Pure White
Lighting: Hinkley Congress collection
Wall tile: Home Depot
Tile grout: TEC Silverado
Outlets and switches: Legrand Radiant
Pink sink: Thermocast
Faucet: Kraus from Home Depot
Island butcher block: Lumber Liquidators sealed with Waterlox
Flooring: Lumber Liquidators maple engineered wood
Knobs: eBay
Stove: KitchenAid from Home Depot
Dishwasher: KitchenAid from Home Depot
Coffee maker: KitchenAid
Island stools: Urban Outfitters and The Classy Home 
Rug: vintage Turkish kilim from Etsy

Our living room is soooo close to being completed, I can almost taste it! And it tastes like drywall dust and mortar. (It’ll taste much better once the dust has settled.) While there’s still work to be done in this room, I wanted to show you guys what it looks like so far. Because, so far so good, right?!

The style I’m gravitating towards in our new home is what I like to call Seventies Transitional. A bit of traditional mixed in with 70s modern, with a light and airy vibe. In general, I’m keeping spaces neutral and accenting with a pop of color where it counts. (Remember my pink sink? Still loving it!) My plan for the living room was to make a statement with a gorgeous yellow Joybird sectional. I’m in love with the style and tufting of this sofa, but we may actually spring for a larger complete corner sectional, thanks to Joybird’s excellent customer service. Stay tuned for more on that front! But you can bet we’ll be keeping it yellow.

A friendly reminder of what this space used to be, courtesy of my cell phone when we first visited this home. Where there once was a drop off into this room, we built a step and changed the flooring to signify a change of levels, and also because I wanted an area with light floor, but maybe not the whole first floor of the house.

We installed Lumber Liquidators Island Pearl engineered bamboo flooring in here and the sunroom, and covered high traffic areas with traditional style area rugs (linked at end of post). It was super easy to lay, as the floor boards are all once length, and you can cut each row’s starting board to vary the differences. We purchased a nail gun specifically for the type of nails the flooring needed (which of course was different from the other two kids of nail guns we had!), which cost us around $100 at Lumber Liquidators— much cheaper than paying for installation. So worth it!

The flooring on the top of the step is also from Lumber Liquidators— Natural Maple engineered wood.

(The blue tape you can see on the floor in some of my pictures is where we have to use a sawzall to cut out register openings.)

The absolute most dramatic change we have done to this space is to the walls! Specifically, the fireplace wall. We painted all of the walls in this room Benjamin Moore’s Super White, and hired a mason friend to lay Boral Cultured Stone veneer over the old brick and atop the drywall to create a dramatic stone fireplace wall.

Boral Cultured Stone is a manufactured stone, which comes in a lot of different styles, and is lighter weight than natural stone, so you can lay it in spaces which might not be able to withstand the weight of real stone. Also, it’s much more affordable. We got our stone from Mason Steel in Walton Hills, Ohio, where they have a showroom so you can check out the material before purchasing. I chose the Old Country Fieldstone in Summit Peak color way to achieve a vintage 60s looking fieldstone wall.

As I shared before, we were unable to remove the platform underneath the old TV cabinet, so I decided to build it out to match up with the hearth, taking the hearth all the way across the room. We’re covering the plywood with Wonderboard, then smoothing it over with a few sim coats of Ardex Feather Finish in white. In the nook to the left of the fireplace, I’m building floating shelves and mounting a tv in the middle.

Slowly but surely I’ve been moving plants over from my parents house, where they had been living with me during the first month we owned this home and the space was uninhabitable.

Basically, all I have to finish in the room is the hearth and drywall beside the fireplace (which includes the shelving), and then it will be finished! So exciting! I seriously can’t wait to host my first movie night in here!

So, that’s all for now, folks. Timelines are tricky, because everything takes longer than you expect, and somethings schedules get crazy with social events. I guess it would be easy for me to hide away in the house until projects are finished, but life is going on around me, and I don’t want to miss out on everything!

Next up I’ll share a progress update on the kitchen which is so, so, sooo close to being finished. Much excitement around here!

MATERIAL SOURCES

• fireplace stone- Boral Cultured Old Country Fieldstone in Summit Peak
• wall paint- Benjamin Moore Super White
• sofa- Joybird
• black swing-arm sconce- Overstock
• white side chairs- vintage from 1st Dibs
• white tulip side table- Gilt
• metal bar cart- vintage
• sofa bench- vintage
• coffee table- vintage
• table lamp and floor lamp- vintage
• pottery- vintage and old West Elm (on the right) 
• wooden toy on credenza- Manhattan Toy
• dark credenza- vintage Broyhill Brasilia
• traditional area rug- Lulu & Georgia
• traditional runner- Wayfair
• flooring- Lumber Liquidators
• mini basket on bar cart- Xinh and Co
• curtains- HomeGoods
• curtain rods- IKEA

This post is sponsored by The Home Depot.

If you’ve wondered why I’ve been a little quiet lately, you obviously haven’t been watching my Instagram stories! (I may or may not have been oversharing all of our home renovation details over there.) Every day I’ve been doing something little, or something big, to get this kitchen a big closer to completion. Unless we’re talking about last Tuesday and Wednesday, when I wasted hours of my life painting the refrigerator wall 12 different shades of gray, only to come to the conclusion that gray is not a color I want for my kitchen. But! As my dad always says, it’s not a waste if you learned something!

This past week, I’ve been getting cold feet about a lot of my decisions? Why? Well, because it was time to make the decisions a reality, and I’m simply terrified of committment when it comes to these big home design decisions. I found myself overcome with doubt about my plan for the wooden shelving wall I was getting ready to work on this weekend. So I did some mockups, and decided I’d like the wall and shelves to both be gray. I spent a lot of time mulling over gray colors, and painting the wall with samples, and decided to go back to my original plan. But like another wise man in my life once said, just because you spent a lot of time on something, doesn’t mean it’s any good. (That was my drawing instructor in art school.)

So here I am, back where I started. Wood shelves. This is the area where I plan on storing my most frequently used pantry items, near the stove and kitchen island. (I do have a pantry closet, but it is tucked around the corner at the end of the kitchen.) I was worried about it looking too cluttered with the contrast of the wood shelves with a while wall behind it. But in the end, I decided the gray felt out of place in a room with no other gray, and really am drawn to the warmth of the wood tones.

The appliances I selected from The Home Depot are very sleek and modern, and I think they fit right in with the modern stack bond tile arrangement we decided on. I especially love how the white refrigerator just blends in so well with its white surroundings, yet the steel handles on the door elevate it to look like a chic piece of furniture in the space.

OUR REFRIGERATOR SELECTION:

KitchenAid Counter Depth French Door Refrigerator

– EXTENDFRESH Temperature Management System helps keep food fresh
– Interior water dispenser provides easy access to filtered water
-Produce Preserver helps keep fruits and vegetables fresh

Tonight I’m working on building a cabinet to surround the fridge which will make it look built-in, but also give me hidden storage above it. This wall is going to be so amazing when it’s finished! (Fingers crossed!)

Most of my accessories for the kitchen are either nondescript white dishes, or jars and baskets that definitely learn towards country. If I were to describe the style I gravitate towards, I would say it’s 1970s modern with Scandinavian simplicity, a little bit country (the minimally styled primitive stuff), and a dash bohemian. I really love bright, airy spaces with mostly white and neutrals, but pops of color here and there to add personality— like my pink sink! While I do love the clean and white look, I also crave the warmth of wood.

We have completely changed up the island in the center of the kitchen and topped it with the a butcher block countertop we had purchased for our last kitchen renovation— we loved it so much we did it again! The countertop is a precut countertop specifically sized for island uses, and it just so happened to be the perfect fit for our island! I sealed it with Waterlox to give it the rich color, but more importantly to give it a food safe protection from water. The flooring we decided on for most of the first floor is also from Lumber Liquidators— engineered maple. Super easy to instal! I highly recommend it for an inexpensive flooring option.

The island will also be getting a built-in microwave which I purchased from Home Depot after having such a good experience with my other larger kitchen appliances. It’s white, so it’ll blend in with the island, and be easily accessible for warming up my coffee for the fifth time each morning as a mother does.

I still love the pink sink! And love it even more now that we have a new dishwasher beside it. I can’t even explain how excited I was to have a new dishwasher that does an amazing job cleaning my dishes! My silverware and clear glass storage containers were all cloudy from the dishwasher at our old house. Just one time through in this new one, and most of the cloudiness is already gone! Very impressed. And I like that it matches the fridge.

OUR DISHWASHER SELECTION:

KitchenAid Top Control Dishwasher in White

– PROWASH cycle adapts to achieve best cleaning based on soil level
– Heat Dry option w/ recessed heat element helps ensure dry dishes
– Fold-down tines in lower rack adjust to 1 of 3 positions

It’s so exciting to have my dream stove in place, and did you notice? I built a box for my hood vent, and love the way it looks! Especially now that I’ve finally started to instal the wall tile. The tile will receive a very light gray grout that will allow for the stack bond pattern to still be seen easily, but it won’t be as bold as it looks now, sans grout.

I can’t wait until this space is all finished up and I can host my first brunch, with skillets of yumminess on each of the six burners on my new KitchenAid commercial range. It’s the crown jewel of our kitchen renovation.

OUR STOVE SELECTION:

KitchenAid Commercial Style 36″ Range

– Dual fuel combines gas cooking surface with an electric oven
– EVEN-HEAT True Convection helps keep the perfect temperature
– 20K BTU ULTRA POWER dual-flame burner ranges from high-to-low

This weekend we’re finishing the tiles and fridge cabinet, then next week I’m installing the floating shelves on the window wall and the wood shelving next to the fridge. After that, it’s just a few small details! (toe kicks, door and floor trim, and lighting!) Thanks for following along with me on this journey. It’s such a treat to share it with you!

If you want to check out my other kitchen planning posts, you can see where I started and some of the planning and demo details.

• We’re Buying a House!
• New Kitchen Plans
  
• KITCHEN PROGRESS: Demolition and Appliance Shopping!
• Kitchen Progress: Ooooh We’re Halfway There!

I acknowledge that The Home Depot is partnering with me to participate in the promotional program for appliances. As a part of the program, I am receiving compensation in the form of products and services, for the purpose of promoting The Home Depot. All expressed opinions and experiences are my own words. My post complies with the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Ethics Code and applicable Federal Trade Commission guidelines.