The Plan for our kitchen--the colors

Jason and I needed to decide on a color scheme for our kitchen.  It had to match our black appliances, black countertop, and red stand mixer and blender.

I

Picture of a kitchen we saw while house hunting and loved.  This was our inspiration.

What this picture doesn't show is the super cute formica table they used to stage the house.  

So, using this as a jumping off point, we knew we wanted a "red kitchen."  However, since red can be such an overwhelming color, we didn't want our kitchen to look tacky.  (Or at least tacky in a way that was pleasing to us)

We also have hardwood floors, which I absolutely love and were a huge selling point of the house, so we are keeping those.

Our "before" kitchen

I googled "red kitchen" and started pouring through tons of search results.  It was tricky because just black and red was a little too 80s-sounding to me (I'm sure it could look great with the right combination) and it was a little too dark.  Since there is already some white in the kitchen, I narrowed my search to kitchens with black, white, and red as the main colors. 

The problem with those colors was I thought red walls would overwhelm the kitchen, I'm too old-and-not-goth for black walls, and white walls in a kitchen sound boring and would show all of the dirt.  So I was going to need one more color in my kitchen.  I wanted this color to seem neutral though and help the red to stand out, rather than compete with the red. 

After a lot of searching, I found the perfect kitchen on the Better Homes and Gardens Website:

First kitchen color scheme I wanted. 

http://www.bhg.com/kitchen/color-schemes/inspiration/red-kitchen-design-ideas/?rb=Y#page=2

I showed it to Jason and he said he liked it.  Then he scrolled through the other pictures on the same website and found one he ACTUALLY liked:

Kitchen color scheme Jason and I both liked.

http://www.bhg.com/kitchen/color-schemes/inspiration/red-kitchen-design-ideas/?rb=Y#page=4

He confessed that the one I liked he was just faking enthusiasm for, but THIS one was perfect.  I liked this one too.  I liked how the green didn't overwhelm the kitchen, and the red still really popped, but there wasn't so much red that it looked like a blood bath.  So we agreed on this color scheme, but these tiles were not the right fit for our backsplash. 

We went to Menards and looked at backsplash options for a really long time.  I found an awesome backsplash I loved.  We bought it and I came home and googled for "red kitchen with black and white backsplash."  I found this, which was pretty much the same colors and exactly the same backsplash we had planned:

A kitchen with a similar color scheme and the same tile backsplash we bought.

Extreme close-up of the tile.

http://www.hgtvremodels.com/kitchens/a-kitchen-crafted-for-the-eco-friendly/index.html

So this was our common vision of the colors we wanted to see in our kitchen.

Please excuse the brevity of this post, it was PERFECT and somehow the perfect draft got erased and I had to rewrite it...twice...