A little home tour- the kitchen

I did this when we first moved into our home, because we had changed so much in our house, and I wanted to share our living space!  Well, I don't know what it was, but after returning from the US, I got the itch to move and change things around again, and since we needed a nursery in addition to a big girl room for Riley, plus a more appropriate living area for our growing toddler, we changed things up.  And we're still changing things.  AND, we've done a lot of work on the outside of the house as well.  We're of course still not done with many of the rooms, or the outside, so I'll have to do this in stages, but here's what we've got.

We'll start with the kitchen.  Here's the BEFORE, first when the old owners were living there (so with all of their furniture), and then all cleaned out.

This was taken literally the day we moved in.  We didn't even have a microwave yet.  The "accent wall" was sort of a teal blue/green color (which, why would THAT wall be your accent wall?), the hardwood floor ended before going into the dining area, the counters were laminate, the curtains (you can barely see them) were so puffy and an odd shimmery color, and there was no window treatment on the kitchen window.  Here's what it looks like NOW:

First we painted... and you may notice that the wall on the left is light blue, and the wall on the right is grey... yeah, we haven't quiiiiiiite finished.  Also, I REALLY wanted new white wooden cabinets, but that wasn't in the budget, and you can't really paint these cabinets, so we had to work around them.  We added a roman blind to the window, replaced their old curtains (you'll see that more in the dining room later), extended the hardwood floor into the dining area, AND my most favorite, most recent addition- granite counter tops and tile back splash!!

Now, in the US, granite counters are THE thing to have.  All the newer houses likely have them, or something fairly comparable.  In New Zealand, I have not been to a single house that has granite counter tops.  Some of the newer built houses are putting them in (that I've seen in pictures), but they are so expensive to get!  We actually brought granite tiles over from the US when we moved here (crazy, I know), so all we had to pay for was installation, which wasn't really a big deal, and I think it will definitely help when it comes time to resell our house.  We also already had the blue glass mosaic tiles, we just had to decide on the design for the back splash.  We contemplated doing the whole back splash out of those tiles, but decided it might be a tad too bright and bold, so we just bordered a plain gray tile back splash with them.

And one more view (baby's fridge magnets removed for the sake of pictures):

Now, is this my dream kitchen?  No.  There are a lot of things I would change if funds would allow.  But, it's perfect for us right now!  And I'm still trying to figure out what to put on those shelves, they are pretty narrow so we're a bit limited in what they can hold...  Work in progress, I suppose.  Anyway, a side-by-side before and after:

So that's the kitchen!  Dining room and lounge, coming soon.  I hope.