#How I Repainted My Rental Kitchen and Made Peace With the Cherry Cabinets

There's one big thing I've been meaning to do ever since we moved to this new apartment four months ago: paint the kitchen. My kitchen has cherry-stained cabinets, dark granite countertops, light birch wood floors, and the walls were painted a sage-y green. It was like this when we moved in, and the longer I lived with it, the more I was desperate for a change.

I'm not here to disparage cherry cabinets or granite countertops; the cabinets in my kitchen are solid wood and spacious, and I know granite has its advantages. so there is a lot to be thankful for. However, I will say that if I were to design my dream kitchen, these elements would probably be on the opposite spectrum of what I'd go for. I'm just more of a white-and-wood kind of person, not a cherry-and-granite kind of person.

Here's what the kitchen looked like when we moved in:

My biggest issue with the cherry-and-granite combination is that it can easily look dated. I think the cabinets in this kitchen were installed in the early 2000s. They may have been great then, but now they're scuffed and dull, and the dark granite just pulls everything down. What's more is that the green on the wall is doing nothing to help; in fact, it's kind of hurting everything.

But wait! Aren't complimentary colors (in this case, red and green, which are on the opposite ends of the color wheel) supposed to go together? Well, yes. if you want both colors to appear brighter. In this case the green makes the cherry color pop more, which was exactly the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted the redness of the cabinets to recede, to blend in more with the surroundings. That meant that green was the worst color for me, and I'd need to go with something closer to the the color of the cabinets, or a neutral, in order to tone the whole look down.

My first instinct was to paint the walls white, but bright white also has the effect of making darker colors jump out, so that wasn't going to work either. My older sister recommended I go with gray, so after way too many paint samples, I finally settled on two colors: a light taupe-gray on the upper part of the wall, and an inky black on the bottom.

Here's one more BEFORE (complete with paint swatches on the wall!):