“I finally — after months of fighting the idea — decided to lean into the cabinet color,” she says. She initially painted the kitchen lilac and wanted to use a plum-colored contact paper on the cabinets, but things got a lot better once she decided to “completely color drench the kitchen to match” her red-toned cabinets.
The colorful kitchen is renter-friendly.
“Before even moving in, I knew I didn’t love the rental’s auburn-cherry cabinets with the taupe wall color and bright white backsplash,” Megan says. “It was a lot of cool/neutral and warm competing against each other. Even though everything in the kitchen was brand-new, it felt dated, and I wanted to make some big changes without harming any of the work the landlords put in.”
Her color-correcting choices were renter-friendly, like the paint she finally landed on for the walls (Behr’s Red Chipotle) and the wallpaper she put on the ceiling.
Wallpapering the ceiling was a first.
“The wallpaper hanging was definitely the most time-consuming, but it’s so worth it!” she says. She and her husband, David (@greatjobdave), installed each panel, and it took a bit of trial and error. “I highly recommend push pins in the corners while the paper is curing,” Megan adds.
DIY projects add even more whimsy to the kitchen.
Megan swapped the builder-grade flush-mount light with a rattan pendant, added new cabinet knobs from H&M, made DIY café curtains, and hung planters in the windows. She painted a freestanding kitchen island that she found on the sidewalk light blue (Rustoleum’s Ink Blue) “to bring everything together and give us more counter space and mini kitchen dining nook,” she says.
“I also loved hanging art on the backsplash with Command Velcro strips to break up the white and add a little color and character to the space,” she adds. And she likes how colorful and character-filled the whole kitchen is — with a little bit of sparkle thanks to the disco ball, of course.
“I love how warm and inviting it is,” she says. “It’s really like standing in a terracotta pot looking up through the flowers. It’s whimsical, eclectic, and full of life.”