If you followed along on Instagram stories you saw that I started a mini kitchen update in January. When we built our home in 2020 I kept a very neutral color palette for our kitchen. We chose light taupe cabinets, white quartz countertops, and a white backsplash—It was a very neutral color palette. ha! Here is what our kitchen looked like before our mini update.

It was absolutely beautiful and I loved the light and airy feeling, but it just felt like it needed something more. We decided to make some simple (and fairly inexpensive!) changes to warm up the space a little bit.

3 Simple Changes to Transform Our Kitchen

1. Paint the Island

The very first change I made was painting the kitchen island to give the space some contrast. If I am being honest, I was terrified to paint it! What if it looked bad? What if I chose the wrong color? What if I didn’t like it dark? Ultimately I just had to jump in and go for it! It’s just paint—I could always paint it again if I didn’t like it. You can read my blog post where I share my inspiration for our island here. I decided to use Rock Bottom by Sherwin Williams. This color definitely makes it into my top paint colors list! I like to call it our chameleon color. It is blue in the shadows and green in natural light. It’s the best of both worlds!

2. Update Cabinet Hardware

After I painted the island I knew I needed to update our kitchen hardware. Our knobs and pulls were black and they blended in to the new island color. It was screaming for some pretty antique gold hardware! Have y’all looked at cabinet hardware recently? It is not cheap! I didn’t have the budget to pay $16+ for a cabinet pull and $10+ for a cabinet knob so I took to Amazon! I found the style of knob I was looking for for $1.65 each! I was thrilled! The only problem was the seller didn’t offer matching pulls. I ended up buying some cabinet pulls that looked similar in color in pictures. The pulls were $7 each. If you saw in Instagram stories, the colors were a little off once I received the knobs and pulls. I was so disappointed! I didn’t have many options, so I decided to use Rub n’ Buff to tone down the yellow in the pulls and I was able to get the two colors almost identical!

3. Add a bold rug

Our current runner was a hand-me-down from the bathroom in our last home. It is beautiful and has a vintage look—it’s honestly one of my favorite rugs we have! But once we painted the kitchen island I just knew we should update the rug to something bold as well. Revival Rugs was kind enough to gift us a new runner for our kitchen (and bathroom!) All of Revival’s rugs are hand made using traditional techniques and natural fibers. Our vintage rug was handmade in Turkey! One of a kind, handmade vintage rugs are more expensive up front, but the quality and workmanship shows! Our runners are so well made and will last for years and years to come. We chose a bold runner for our kitchen with dusty pink, indigo, navy, and dark brown. It is beautiful and is definitely a show stopper in our kitchen! Use code 10OFF-HANNAHKIRKMAN until March 10th for 10% off of your very own vintage rug!

I am thrilled that we were able to make 3 small, simple updates to our kitchen to completely change the look and feel! We have some other plans for the kitchen in the future, but for now I am diggin’ what it looks like.