Vintage Life: Kitchen Krazy!

Before we started the renovation of our 1920s vintage bungalow, Greg and I talked about which things were most important to each of us. Greg (the music lover) wanted the whole house to be wired for media so that he could listen to his favorite tunes in surround sound, no matter which room he was in.

As for me, I wanted a gorgeous and unique kitchen – unlike anything you would see in most homes. Although I know it is very trendy, I really didn't see myself in a kitchen with dark wood cabinets and granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. I wanted colorful, painted cabinets that looked vintage and had a great deal of character.

Stock kitchen cabinets were out of the question so we hired a local craftsman, John Hopfensperger of Cayce Custom Cabinetry.  I fell in love with his ability to create custom paint finishes with as much distressing as I’d like. I wanted the aqua green-blue color that you see on vintage 1957 Chevrolets because it matched my hand-painted Italian Deruta dishes that we bought in San Gimignano when we lived in Europe.  I know the vibrant colors are not for everyone, but I love it!

The style of the kitchen cabinets were influenced by  this antique kitchen cabinet that we found at the Antique Tobacco Barn in Asheville. We actually bought that cabinet to be a built-in bookcase in our bedroom so I can use it to display my favorite books and family photos. (It's not full yet in this photo... I'm still working on it!) The three upper areas have glass doors and the three lower areas have solid wood doors.

There were four extra glass doors that came with this bookcase, and we decided those would make great kitchen cabinet doors.

You might remember that I blogged about an awesome vintage double sink (it still has the original Sears catalogue sticker from 1952 inside) that we found at a ReStore when we were antiques shopping in Asheville. We had it completely restored and here it is mostly installed.

That's the background story, I'll show you in my next post how it all turned out!