Kitchen Window Before & After

So the kitchen window was my big project last week.

First I gave the window trim a nice fresh coat of white paint. I also painted the wall area surrounding the window with a verrrrrrrrry pale gray-toned neutral-ish color. I'm so happy with how it all came out.

As you can see from the before picture above...I had a horrible view of the neighbors house. Needless to say, we always kept the blinds closed. I followed an easy tutorial from the Making It Feel Like Home blog to create a patterned frosted privacy glass look on the lower half of the window. The only thing I did different was to scale down the stencil image to 75% (under the print setting). This part of the project only cost me about $2.50 (for half a roll of contact paper).

I made the roman shade using vintage curtain material that I bought at a yard sale about 10 years ago. I used the mini blinds that were already being used in the kitchen. My only investment was the fabric glue, and I only used half a bottle, so this project only cost me about $2. I followed a tutorial from Little Green Notebook (if you haven't checked out that site you should!).

I honestly thought that I had a before shot of sink / window area, but apparently I only had pictures of both sides :(
Anyways, you can see that before there was a typical 1950's era decorative cutout over the window. While I think it was cute looking I just really wanted something more sophisticated and timeless. We did save the cutout piece to try and reuse on another project someday. 

The other thing we did was to take down the rounded shelves on either side of the window. Again, they were cute, but sort of more "retro" than I wanted. Taking down the shelves also visually opened up the area so much. It really makes it look twice as big now.

Hopefully, our next big project will be putting in a white subway tile back splash.