Inspiration for Colors

The kitchen in our 100 year old house is mostly white with gray and pale yellow with aged maple floors. That’s why when I found some vintage oak stools, they just weren’t doing the trick. I needed to find some inspiration for colors from something and here’s what it was…

Even though the walls are fairly neutral in our kitchen, there are splashes of color in the artwork and accessories around the room.

Like these fun colorful rooster bowls, that hang on the wall above the peninsula. (remember these bowls back at our former house? this is how I displayed them there)

But back to our current house…

Here’s what the stools looked like before in our kitchen:

The oak finished wood wasn’t vintage enough to be charming… it was more like the ‘oak-ey yok-ey’ from the 1980’s… sorry, not my favorite. I found these stools on Craigslist for $10.

I have been thinking about all different ways to paint them, but because I wasn’t coming up with the perfect plan, they went unpainted for over a year.

Are you like me? Do you live with something totally fine until one day you suddenly can’t live with it that way any more? That’s how I can be sometimes, I mill stuff around in my head, trying to figure out the best look for something, and usually find some sort of inspiration somewhere to get me going on finally changing the thing that was bugging me to begin with.

With these 2 oak stools that was for sure the story. But then one day this spring, after stopping in a cute vintage shop in a neighboring town, I found (and bought) a very simple stool that someone had painted red and put a cute striped fabric on top.

Absolutely nothing fancy about it at all… but maybe it’s just in it’s simplicity that I found something kind of charming about it, and that’s why I brought it home.

Also, we only had 2 stools at the peninsula, but it seemed that we were frequently wanting one more stool… And this one was narrow enough that I could squeeze it on the end of the peninsula without feeling like it was crowding the kitchen too much.

Once I brought that stool into the kitchen, I realized, there was my inspiration…

I hauled the two 1980’s oak stools outside and started.

First giving them both a good coat of spray paint primer.

And then spray paint. Wow, there are so many lovely colors of spray paint available now, even with different finishes, flat matte, satin and gloss. I did kind of want a satin finish, but the colors that looked best with the stripe were only in a gloss finish.

Here’s my rationalization for the color selection…

There are 3 stools, now, but they aren’t matching in style, so instead of having the one stick out like an oddball, I decided to use the fabric stripe for the inspiration for colors of paint… The stripe has 3 colors on it, and that stool was already one of the colors, so simple for me to deduct that the other two stools should be each the other two colors…

hmmmm…. is that one of those things that makes sense in my ‘pattern’ making brain, but sounds a bit crazy to you? ha ha, oh well, it works for me. 😉

They are cute and fun now. And add a bright splash of color in the kitchen.

And the stool colors look good with the colorful accessories around the room, including the rooster bowls hanging above them.

If I come across a great new idea for inspiration for them them in a few years, trust me, I’m not afraid to change them later. 🙂 But for now, we like them and I’ve only got about $25 or $30 invested in all 3 stools with the paint and everything, (including the actual cost for the 3 stools!) so no big deal to change the color, or even sell them and change the stools all together some day.

So what are you using for inspiration for colors in your kitchen?
Want to read a little more?

Click here to read more about color.

Click here to read more about the kitchen in our 100 year old house.

Click here to see all the posts I’ve written so far about the projects renovating our 100 year old house.
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