Painting the wall behind our open shelving with Simply White paint

My kitchen has been through many colors. For years I’ve had a dark tannish-greige on the interior wall, opposite of the kitchen window. Since our house has an East-west exposure, I decided it was time to paint a brighter color behind our open shelving with simply white paint to open up the room a little more. I used the same Simply White that I used on the cabinets to bring in more uniformity.

I like Simply White because compared to White Dove it’s slightly cooler, and less yellow, but still on a warmer white side.

Here’s a picture of the wall before our open shelving went up. I had a trim piece there to separate the paint colors. The greige is Coastal Beige.

Once the open shelving went up, the paint colors weren’t as apparent, but I noticed it photographed weird. The bottom shelf is at the color cut-off and it almost had an ombre affect (which, FYI, I had to look up whether or not I should use affect or effect here. Why can’t grammar make it just a little bit easier to talk about decorating?), and didn’t look as clean. It just seemed dark on that side of the kitchen as well.

So while hubby was out of town last week (he should really learn not to go anywhere.), I was able to get quite a few projects done that I’ll be sharing with you over the next week or so (What is it about the hubby going out of town that spur’s the whole get-it-done thing?).

I never realized how dark the tan color was until I started painting the white. Look how the white in the next room really stands out against the darker walls.

It was almost liberating to have it on the wall.

Here’s what I have learned.

Paint the wall behind open shelving BEFORE you put up said shelving. Painting around it added over an hour to my time. A 30 minute wall ,with our open shelving, took almost two hours with all of the stuff I had to paint around. I was cursing at myself the entire time.

So I have a reveal coming for you, but I wanted to share the process separately. I am so glad to have it done, because I kept putting it off and putting it off. I honestly made it more work in my head than it really was.

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