Lime green always reminds me of spring. To me it symbolizes rebirth and renewal and I really wanted to use it to add some fun accessories and and color to our newly renovated kitchen.

Pops of lime and avocado

Before the revamp our round house was tiny, 30 square meters or 322.92 square feet with one bedroom, a full bathroom and an open plan kitchen lounge area. The kitchen cupboards and floor were dark and dingy and made the kitchen area look even smaller than it actually was.

Dark and dingy cupboards

Sorry about the picture quality 🙁 but you get the point, not nice. The bottom kitchen cabinets were badly water damaged in some places and while I would have loved to save them, and some money, it just wasn’t feasible so we had to rip them out. The bits and pieces that we could save we kept for other projects around the house.

That floor also had to go unfortunately. Every time someone walked in the door, I’d find myself sweeping to try get rid of dusty foot prints. This is our holiday home for goodness sake!! Funny thing, when you start ripping things out you just can’t stop, so we took everything out and started again.

The gutted kitchen

The kitchen units are gone and the tiles are out and it already looks lighter 🙂 To make the room look larger, we decided to stay with a neutral color palette of white, grey and black. We replaced the bottom kitchen cupboards with plain white melamine units, which we covered with textured wallpaper. It was the most cost effective way for us to create the look we were going for. We also found some antique looking door handles at a flea market, which we sprayed white and distressed lightly with sand paper to match the wallpaper on the doors.

New look kitchen cupboards

We used Airodex Feather Finish on the counter tops. I was amazed at how easy it was to apply, almost like icing a cake and the color and finish is beautiful.  The counter tops were sealed with a food safe, hard wearing sealer.

Sealed Airodex counter tops

One of the best decisions we made was to replace the top kitchen cabinets with rubber coated open shelves. Yup, rubber coated, the same stuff they use to line the back of pick-up trucks and bakkies. Just measure and cut the shelves using whatever wood you have lying around and then either paint them yourself with a rubber paint or send them in to be rubberized. They are so easy to clean, look amazing and should last us life time down at the coast.

Rubberised open shelves

I love the texture and the look of these shelves. Here’s a close up view and it fits perfectly with the white, grey and black color scheme. What do you think?

Close up view

We added some lime green accessories, like these silicone egg cups and small clock.

Cute lime green accessories

And this plastic jug and matching wine glasses.

Plastic jug and wine glasses

For extra storage we added some crates which we painted in a olive grey color to store important documents and other bits and bobs.

Extra storage crates

And if we couldn’t find the right accessories we made our own.

Creating the palette

We made the kitchen blinds using 4 dish towels sewn together and I painted two large pictures to hang on the walls. (If you’ve seen our hanging dining room you might remember the painting of the cups) Hubby made a kitchen towel rack from a piece of drift wood and some pretty door knobs we had lying around.

Drift wood towel rack

Gorgeous hey? Mother Nature also helps out by giving us these Granny Smith apples and tangy, fresh limes. We found an old plant pot, which we use to hold all our cooking utensils and the Dinner Choices sign is so appropriate for a holiday home don’t you think?

A little help from Mother Nature

We also found these hanging planters in the garden section of our local hardware, which we hung up above the sink to free up some very valuable counter space. We use them to store all our washing up bits and pieces, and the color was just right for the our Lime popping kitchen.

Keeping stuff of the counters

All in all I’m really happy with how our kitchen turned out, especially when I compare the before and after and the revamp cost us just under R 10 000 so it wasn’t as costly as we thought it would be. It definitely helps if you try to do as much as possible yourself.

Before and After

I’d love to hear what you think. Do the Pops of Lime work for you?