Our Summer Project

I just posted this over on our house blog, but wanted to post it here, too.  Because I'm obsessed.

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It's the moment you've all been waiting for.  The moment where I give you more information and more photos than you wanted about the project that took just a little bit of our souls.

Just as a refresher, we started here.  And then got crazy with some serious structural changes.  Behold, the finished project:

It just makes our kitchen and family room feel SO BIG.  The funny thing is that we gained ZERO square footage, and absolutely no additional living space.  Really, we just gained a countertop {which is AMAZING}, and some open space.  Proof that more is less.

For the color scheme of the kitchen/family room, I went with gray, light blue/gray, and navy with accents of coral, teal, and red.  It sounds busy, but I've been super happy with how it all pulls together.  Very soothing.

The pendant lights are from Lowe's, Allen + Roth.  They take the Edison bulbs, but other than that, we looooove them.  And at $50 a pop, they're a pretty good deal.

After great and serious deliberation, we painted the family room, hallway, and kitchen the color of our bedroom:  hidden cove.  The original plan was to go with the ever-popular Rockport Gray, but we got the sample pot {ALWAYS get the sample pot, guys}, and I didn't *love* the way it looked with our backsplash and granite.  And every woman deserves to love her kitchen, am I right?

I absolutely love the way a soft blue-gray plays off of our white cabinets and blends well with the cool undertones of our backsplash and granite.  I was pretty nervous about having a decisively blue living space, but I'm so glad we made the plunge.

Here's a shot of the laundry doors and countertop {and also shows how it is open to the family room}.  For the countertops, our long-term plan is to go with a solid white top {quartz or corian}.  For now, though, we just put a piece of white plyboard on top, and sanded and sanded and sanded.  Then added some trim to the edges, and painted it with our cabinet primer {Zinsser} and paint {Sherwin Williams' Pro Classic tinted to Benjamin Moore's Simply White}.  It looks great, and has held up really well all summer long.  We don't really use this counter space as 'prep space' in the kitchen, so that might help, but we think it's a fantastic short-term solution.

Aren't the laundry doors cool?  I Pinterested around {totally a legit word} and gave Nic some images of barn doors.  I wanted something with character, but not something totally crazy.  And he delivered!  I painted them with the cabinet paint and used simple window sash hardware as the closure.

They definitely swing wide when opened, but it's not an issue since they're only opened when I'm switching laundry loads.  One thing we love is that we can't hear the washer or dryer at all when the doors are shut {which is important because these puppies are literally in the middle of our living space}.

We did need to put these wheels on the doors to offer support since they are so big and heavy.  I love them though; I think it adds some character.

As for laundry storage {one of my top concerns}, we obviously could have quickly and easily built something that fit between the washer and dryer.  I was taking a stroll through Target one day, though, and found this 'desktop organizer' for like 12 bucks.  I added some casters and some cute hardware {also Target!}, and it works perfectly.

So here's what we started with:

And here's where we are:

We're just so happy with how it all turned out!