Designing For My Life ~ Around My LuRay Collection

Tonight I am joining Kari & Kijsa's post Designing For Your Life.

What a neat idea. I just have to answer these three questions:

Where: The Kitchen
Style: Traditional? Vintage
Favorite Item: My LuRay Dinnerware Collection!

For this Designing for Your Life post, I just had to show you how we went from a dark and drab seventies galley kitchen to an opened space with light and breezy colors just perfect for my vintage LuRay dinnerware collection. (I apologize for anyone who has seen this already...I know, I tend to show it whenever possible... I can't help it... I love it THAT much!)

This was the view as you walked in the front door. The kitchen is right behind those "Brady Bunch" style spindles and dark oak walls. We loved the house but knew this had to be changed right away. Dear Hubs really got a kick out of whacking at the spindles with his electric saw.

The problem was what to do with the remaining portion of the cabinets and that 1/2 wall left over. We came up with a plan . . .

This little "partition" also came out and went "bye bye!"

We decided to move the remaining portion on the right (behind the half wall is the stove and two side countertops with cabinets) forward, toward the other side of the kitchen, allowing us to add a quartz countertop over the entire thing, creating an island. This allowed more room for us to walk around it. Dear Hubby added the pendant lights as well as the lights in the ceiling. Love those! Some of the cabinets have lighting as well, inside.

Above is an after photo...although it was taken last Christmas and I didn't clear the clutter out of the way for the photo but you get the idea. We painted all the cabinets (some are cringing at the thought of this, I had no qualms whatsoever!) a creamy white and replaced the doors with glass to highlight my LuRay dinnerware collection. I had been collecting these dishes since 1992 and we knew it was "now or never" to display them so we went for it.

We absolutely love the transformation...and it is where we usually hang out, have friends over, sit and chat or work on projects. The new kitchen now is a seamless transition into the family room....making it even better for entertaining.

Thanks for sharing with me in our "Design for Life!"