my kitchen inspiration

As I have said before, my home was built in 1930 and although many people would try to modernize it, that's not my style. In fact, the previous owners were set to gut the entire house, from what I can tell with all the pamphlets in the cupboards. Luckily, they never got around to it and decided to sell the house.

One of the main things they were going to do was put in dark wood cabinets, granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances. You know... like every. single. house. you see on HGTV, especially House Hunters. They had already started with the stove, the sink, the fridge and most of the knobs. It looked ridiculous, because the original 1930s cabinetry was still in place, but it was topped with 1970s white, stained, laminate counter tops and the floor was a horrid dark reddish brown linoleum. On top of that the whole room was painted puke brown, including the cabinets and the hinges. I don't know if they were trying to make it monochromatic or what, but the whole thing was a mess.

Below are some before pictures to give you an example. It was right after I moved in, so please excuse the mess.

 Here you can see all the 'lovely' brown, the counter tops and the sink...

 This is a close up of a cabinet that was added later in the house's history (it's gone now) and you can see the  horrible knobs....

 The painted over hinges... ugh!

More brown cabinets on the bottom and the gross flooring.

And finally the breakfast nook where they had tried to minimize the cute details.

See what I mean? Awful.

Can you imagine that little room with dark wood? It was already dark enough!

Anyway, at first I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, except to get that brown out of there and although I knew I didn't want it to look like my last kitchen (that you can see in this post), because it wasn't right for the house, I had to do something right away. So, I sanded down all cabinets and doors, soaked all the hinges to get the paint off, and then painted everything white to get a blank canvas. I knew then that I wanted color and lots of it, but I waited about 6 months to get a feel for what the kitchen needed and spent a great deal of time looking at pictures of 1920s, 1930s and 1940s kitchens that I found on the internet. 

Here are some of my favorites:

A couple of breakfast nook examples.

That generation certainly wasn't afraid of color and patterns!

  Here's some real life kitchens from the era, just for fun:

And finally, here are recent pictures from magazines, museums, and movies that I saved for inspiration via pinterest:

Pretty neat, huh?

After looking at all these pictures and more (a lot more!), I came to the conclusion that it should look like a kitchen built in 1930 (which it was), that had progressed over time, but had stopped somewhere around 1960. I thought it would seem more natural that way and I wouldn't have to stick to one era, since that's not the way the rest of the house is decorated. After all, I wanted it to look old, like grandma's kitchen, not a 1930s museum!

Well, that's all I have for today. I hope you enjoyed it.

I promise I'll show you what I did soon ;)

rue