Our Yellow Kitchen Renovation: A Story in Two Parts
The kitchen is the heart of the home, so when we moved into our fixer upper home in 2021, I made it the focal point our energy and attention, setting my sights on a yellow kitchen renovation that would create the perfect cheerful space for cooking and family time.
We plan to be in this home for a while, so our hope was to renovate slowly over the years, as time and budget allowed.
But life dealt us some twists and turns, so this is not so much a story of the road to our dream kitchen as it is about dealing with the very real ups and downs of home ownership while staying true to our taste and budget.
Phase One: A Partial Kitchen Renovation with a DIY Demo and Paint
We bought a fixer upper home in 2021, that probably had not been lived in or updated since the ‘70s (the whole experience is a story for another time). The kitchen was extremely dark and dingy, but I actually loved the layout. It’s a galley kitchen that is open on both ends, connecting a living area in the front of the house to a large sunlit dining room in the back. It literally feels like the heart of our home.
But there was a ways to go before it felt that way—or was even a space we could cook in.
Here are the things that we did when we moved in to get a head start on our long term kitchen makeover.
Upper Cabinet Demo & Soffit Removal
We demoed the upper cabinets along the L shape lining the corner and exterior wall (and by “we” I mean my husband and a friend). The cabinets were small, cubby-like, and made the room feel dark. There was also an awkward box next to the oven where an older built in oven clearly had been prior to the new floor unit being added later on.
We removed the soffit above the cabinets as well, and luckily it was empty except for a couple of pipes, which we sort of awkwardly cover up with drywall.
Removing the upper cabinets and soffits opened up a ton of visual space in our narrow galley style kitchen.
Replaced the Oven and Removed the Old Range Hood
The oven and range hood were extremely old and disgusting—my husband still swears that removing them was the worst part of any work we’ve done on the house. We knew we’d have to leave the existing refrigerator, countertops, sink and vinyl flooring until a later time.
The washer and dryer were also in the kitchen. Ultimately we’d want to move them downstairs to the family room area, but again— we added that to the list of utilities and projects that would have to wait.
Our narrow and dark kitchen when we moved into our house in 2021.
Cabinet Restoration and Paint
The solid wood cabinets were in very good shape, so they were definitely worth keeping and fixing up. They were, however coated in many layers of drippy beige pant.
Stripping, sanding and painting these cabinets was a labor of love. They took about 4 or 5 coats of Citristrip, sanding and scraping before they were reading to prime and paint.
The vision for our yellow kitchen
I don’t know what initially inspired a yellow kitchen, but I very quickly settled on it and began to hunt for the perfect color.
If you’ve ever tried to pick yellow paint you know how difficult it can be and I’ve heard a couple of theories as to why. One is that it reflects light most strongly after white paint. I’ve also heard that the human eye is more sensitive to yellow than other colors, which definitely makes sense because a little bit goes a long way.
After much deliberation I decided to paint our kitchen cabinets with Farrow & Ball Sudbury Yellow. I am in love with this yellow paint color. It’s very warm, almost neutral but saturated enough to avoid being dingy, and wonderfully cheerful.
Down the road, we planned to replace the kitchen countertops with a butcher block or plain colored quartz, and tear up the old linoleum to replace it with a natural stone tile, like a Saltillo. But for the time being, the kitchen was cheerful and warm, and I was absolutely in love with my yellow cabinets.
Sudbury Yellow kitchen cabinets. The wall color is Pointing, also by Farrow and Ball. Corner shelves from Amazon.
Phase Two: An Insurance Claim, More Demo, and An Entire Kitchen Renovation
Our lovely kitchen cabinets lasted long enough for us to learn that I was pregnant and welcome our beautiful daughter almost a year later. In September of 2022, our main sewer pipe broke, which lead to the uncovering of a major mold problem behind the walls in half of our home.
Including the kitchen.
In early October, we left home for a family visit out of town. We knew the demo team would be in the house while we were gone but they weren’t really sure exactly how much they’d have to remove until they started to knock down walls and uncover the problem.
This is what it looked like when we got back.
Yes, that is correct. Half of the cabinets were gone. The cabinets that I had worked on for hours and hours, scraping and sanding, the yellow cabinets I thought my family would enjoy for years to come. Gone.
It became an impracticality to try to paint new ones yellow, because they would be replaced with factory finish white cabinets, (unless we wanted to pay out of pocket extra for custom build). I’m actually still not over them being gone. They were my favorite part of our house.
I won’t go into too much of a rant about the process of dealing with all of these repairs but let me say: getting hit with a large insurance claim affecting half of your house near Christmastime, making millions of big and small decisions on the fly while nursing a four month old and chasing a toddler in a house full of construction workers, and trying to somehow afford extra updates that we had planned to save up for years down the road while managing a gigantic plumbing bill was A LOT.
But we got through it and definitely gained some from the whole situation in the end. This is what I tell myself. But my yellow cabinets!
Our sunny yellow kitchen after the renovation was complete.
We moved the washer + dryer downstairs
The demo from the mold remediation opened up the opportunity to get the washer and dryer out of the kitchen. The downstairs bathroom that we turned into our laundry room was also down to studs so it just worked out. The downside of taking advantage of this opportunity was of course that we had to front the cost for this extra upgrade ourselves.
We opted to replace the laundry space in the kitchen with floor to ceiling pantry cabinets. I would have preferred open shelving on the upper half, but we would have had to either custom build them or pay for extra counter slab to place narrow open uppers on top of. But we gained lots of extra storage and were able to line up the cabinets with end of the opposite wall to more clearly define the kitchen/dining spaces.
Blonde wood look luxury vinyl flooring (I don’t remember what brand!), white shaker cabinets and lemon sherbet walls (San Pedro Morning)
New floors, countertops, and sink
The floors and countertops were tricky because of the nature of our insurance-covered repairs. We went through a restoration company (per recommendation from our insurance company), but if we were to do it again we’d pocket the money and find our own construction team. Throughout the whole restoration process we were kind of left in the dark about the details of our budget and where the money was going as the job progressed.
The floor and countertops were the last things to be installed. We tried to save as much as possible on all of the other materials used in other parts of the house, to put towards tile flooring in the kitchen. This was approved at first, but in the end we were told that our budget ran out, and we had to cover the cost of some of these costly updates out of pocket.
The view of our yellow galley kitchen from the dining room.
Instead of the Saltillo we had hoped for, we ended having to use a floating floor (which we still had to pay for out of pocket, but a much less crazy expense than laying the subfloor for tile). The wood look luxury vinyl is not our style per se— we will always prefer using natural materials in our home—but I will say that they are very soft and easy to maintain with kids and pets. And definitely better than old yellowed sheet vinyl.
This long countertop is one of my favorite features of the kitchen layout.
This change in flooring also affected our plans to use butcher block countertops. Instead we chose granite, to contrast the wood look flooring. Granite was surprisingly much less expensive that quartz, but the busy patterns were difficult to reconcile with our idea of bringing a yellow color back into the room.
Dallas White is a budget friendly granite that is not as busy and outdated looking as some of the others in its price point. It’s white with undertones of cream and flecks of lavender and black. We brought yellow paint samples with us when finding the right slab to make sure it wouldn’t be impossible to use with color. It works!
We found the deep basin sink on FB Marketplace for around $90. It came with the chrome faucet, which saved us having to buy a new one.
We love our large single basin sink.
Tile backsplash and yellow paint
After construction was finished, my husband installed a tile backsplash and I painted the walls.
We opted for a 3” square tile to create a low border against the countertops and frame the oven. The off white color helped to tie in the bright white of the cabinets, and the 3” mid size added some interest without competing with the patterned granite.
The cabinets were going to stay white, so I needed to find a yellow wall paint. Generally, I prefer the weight of color on cabinetry against a white wall, rather than vice versa, but trying to wear down the glossy finish on all of those cabinets and paint them was just not an option after all the work we’d been through.
The walls are San Pedro Morning, by Benjamin Moore. The walls reflect much less light because of the window placement in the room, so I opted for a lighter “lemon sherbet” yellow, as opposed to the mustard tone we had used before. I was inspired by some research I did on 1950s retro yellow kitchens, which is when our home was built.
I’ve collected these hand painted plates over the years- I’m really happy with how they look against the lemon yellow walls.
Our kitchen ended up looking quite a bit different from what we had envisioned, but it is cheerful and bright. I have lots of ideas for filling in the space in time to come with some window treatments, hooks, and additional artwork. I did find these rattan bar stools at a thrift store which I fixed up; they add a nice touch to the space, and some pleasant seating options in the kitchen.
My favorite little vignette from our kitchen- a coffee setup under a framed still life, with a welcoming bar stool right next to it. A perfect setup for making a guest a cup of coffee.
I love how the two rattan bar stools are complementary end caps to the kitchen counters. Nice way to tie the space together and soften the edges of the granite countertops.
