plans for the kitchen

I've been in my new apartment for nearly two months now and things are starting to come together. It's never as fast a process as one would like, but I plan on being here for a while and therefore can afford to take my time. With my bedroom livable and my closet basically finished (more on that soon) I've decided that it's time to tackle the most daunting room, the kitchen (cue ominous music). 

It's a difficult room to do anything with. In typical San Francisco fashion it is a fairly narrow galley kitchen, with plenty of inexplicable hooks in strange places, cabinets repainted so many times the doors don't close, and only one window, which is conveniently blocked by a big tree. So the room is fairly dark.

The main thing I've noticed after using this space for the past few weeks is that there is very little counter space. There are some big limitations in storage as well. These are things that I am going to try to address.

Obviously if I could I would love to strip everything down or tear it out and start from scratch. This isn't the optimal way to set up a kitchen in this room for sure. But it is a rental and I think that the challenge of working with what you've got can produce some lovely results, so I am going to embrace the limitations and (hopefully) make something that will work better for me.

In my lifetime there is one thing that I have discovered can change a space (for the better, or I guess for the worse as well) and that is paint. Actually I changed and repainted my childhood bedroom so many times it's been joked that the room is actually slightly smaller now. In the spirit of a fresh start, and an attempt to brighten this space and make a more cheerful room for cooking and entertaining, I am going with yellow! Hopefully I can force my indecisive self to choose one and I can get this started this weekend.