Remember that gorgeous kitchen makeover I featured a few weeks ago that totally blew your mind? You probably don’t, what with your mind being blown and everything. Sorry about that. I hope it cleaned up ok.

To refresh your memory, it was a fantastic French country style kitchen makeover by Cindy who is busy renovating her whole home. Do you think she stopped there though? Pshhh, ha! Cindy would never do that. She’s transformed her dining room too, and it makes me want to move immediately to the French countryside, or at least into Cindy’s guest bedroom.

Lots of things changed here but many stayed the same, like the parquet floors, iron chandelier, and stained glass window.

And now they no longer have to fight against the flocked avocado wallpaper, (which fought so valiantly against any and all attempts at removal that Cindy was forced to lay wood planks right over it, a happy turn of events).

Cindy also swapped out the hot-pink draperies for neutral drop-cloth curtains, scrapped the popcorn ceilings clean, and freshened everything from the baseboards on up with new paint. Even though she went neutral, she still has five colors of paint happening in here, from the ceilings to the trim, to the doors, to the hutch.  Layered neutrals, now that’s how you do it right!

So much more to see from Cindy at Edith & Evelyn.

Hey gang, how was your weekend? If you didn’t spend it in the ER, it was better than mine!

Everything is fine now, but my little guy slipped off a stepladder in the backyard and smacked the side of his head hard on the concrete. He was lethargic and inconsolable, and threw up a few times, so we took him in to be evaluated just in case.  They did a CT scan on him and everything looked normal, thank goodness. He’s a little bruised up, but back to his old self already! Hooray for happy endings!

Christina’s kitchen recently got a happy ending of its own too.  Before, it was tiny, boxy, dark and dated.  But now …

It is exactly none of those things! Of course the size is the same, but the open shelving makes it feel … dare I say it … spacious? You might think that there is no way anyone with such a small kitchen could afford to lose all that cabinet storage, but hush your fears. Not only does she have everything she needs at her fingertips, it looks great on display too.

Open shelving forces you to pare your kitchen down to the necessities. Which is great! It means letting go of the things you don’t really need. It means no teetering stacks of ‘commemorative’ plastic cups, no drawer full of ketchup packets and twisty ties, no magnets that say TORONTO on them when you have never been to Toronto or know a single person in Toronto or have any affiliation with Toronto, (this is a very specific fight that my husband and I had today about a Toronto magnet that he inexplicably decided to hang on the fridge, seriously, anyway, guess who won that fight?)

See how Christina packed a ton of magic into this little kitchen on her blog Christina’s Adventures.