Minor little kitchen spruce up: Big impact.....

I have never loved the kitchen in this house.  I like warm woods and neutral tones in the kitchen with a pop of color on the walls; we inherited a white kitchen with green laminate counters.  Not my fav.  We considered gutting it after we moved here, but opted (right choice) to build a screened porch addition instead.  So I'm still stuck with this white/green combo that's hard to work with.  I wanted beautiful paint on the wall.  After trying 8 different colors, and 5 just in shades of yellow, I gave up and painted it a taupe color. 

I was still bothered by the lack of back splash.  I've had a lot of ideas over the years including new tile, but nothing was worth the cost to add to a kitchen we really didn't love and still want to gut and redo eventually.

I still didn't love it.  I did run across these plates in Kohl's years ago and just wanted those warm cozy colors in my room.  So my "no clutter don't like a lot of stuff self" did the unthinkable: I superglued wall hangers on the back of them and stuck them on the backsplash.  At least I had some color to live with.  Still not happy.
So somewhere in my travels (Pinterest or a magazine, I honestly can't remember now), I came upon a back splash with painted multi-color striped walls.  Oohhh.  I have each of the colors I loved in the plates (golden yellow, reds, greens) and could do some subtle striping on the walls.  Better yet, I have a tester can of two-shades darker than the kitchen color (testing that out for the living room here:

, so I thought that would be a good place to start.

So start I did....about 2 hours before the bus was to arrive on Thursday.  Me, Painters tape, paint and a brush and whammo, I would have striped walls in no time. 

So next comes an issue no fancy tool has been able to cure me from: Actually making something level.  I have levels (three), a laser level, small levels and big levels.  I have some deficiency about how to read the levels I guess, because nothing I hang ends of level.  I don't know either....

So painting stripes has to be level, or it would be horrible.  After three failed iterations of trying, I ended up with this method: I basically copied measuring marks onto a piece of tape, taped it and marked top and bottom on the wall, then stuck the tape to the wall on those marks. It worked.  Perfectly? No, but it's good.

 I'll spare you the pictures of the failed attempts, and just leave you this one: stripes marked out, ready for paint.   Again: this took me a little brain power.  I had to put the tape outside the areas I wanted to paint, and inside the areas I didn't: It took a little thinking.  In this picture it looks like I have little and big spaces marked, but I only painted in the larger space, leaving the smaller the original color. Make sense? I didn't think so, but it's hard to explain!  I had to work through it a few times before I got the tape in the right places.

Anyway, once I got here, it was easy.  tape and paint and tape and paint. 

So here's the before, and after next to it:




and again:



And one more, larger, just because I love it so much:

As much as I want color, this is just so......right.  It's warm, cozy and clean.  It was free. It adds a punch of different without a ton of work and no money.   I'm thrilled with it.  And even though I thought I would add the other colors in when I started, I'm not. I like it just this way.

It just proves again that sometimes, just the smallest of changes make the big difference. 

Tomorrow: the next step.  And the kitchen wasn't even on my "to-do" list for the new year!