Designers said gut the ’70s kitchen. She did the opposite and made it the coziest room in the house
Every home makeover show tells you the same thing about a 1970s kitchen. Tear it out. Start over. Paint it all white. Shannon Ullman ignored every bit of that advice, and the room she ended up with is the one every renter can’t stop talking about when they tour the house.
When she and her husband bought the 1970s ranch house in Boise, Idaho back in 2021, the kitchen was in bad shape. The cabinets had turned yellow from more than 30 years of smoking indoors. A loud fluorescent light sat on the ceiling like something out of a gas station. Someone had pasted floral wallpaper as a border where the wall met the ceiling. Mice had made themselves at home. It smelled worse than it looked, and it didn’t look good either.
They saved it for last because they were dreading it.
What most people would’ve done
If you’ve watched even one home makeover show, you already know what everyone says to do with a kitchen like this. Tear it down to nothing. All-white cabinets. A bunch of small round lights on the ceiling. Light gray stone counters. Plain white tile on the wall. Silver handles. Knock the walls out so the kitchen opens up into the living room, and call it modern.
That’s the safe way to do it. It photos well. It also gives you a room you’ve already seen a hundred times, in a hundred other houses, with nothing that feels like you.
Shannon went the other way.
The first move cost nothing
Her husband started with the short half wall that closed the kitchen off from the living room. He knocked it down. Cost: zero dollars. That one move opened up the view between the two rooms without changing the shape of the kitchen at all.
A lot of people would’ve kept going and knocked out more walls. Shannon stopped there. She kept the kitchen shaped like a kitchen, not like a corner of one big open room.
Then she leaned into the old-school look instead of hiding it
Here’s where the story turns. The next thing she did was add more old-fashioned charm to a room everyone would’ve told her to make look brand new.
She bought two drywall arch kits at $50 (about €46) each and used them to round off the top of the main kitchen doorway. She did the same thing to the new opening her husband had just cut when he took down the half wall. She and her husband put them in themselves, so the labor was free. That’s $100 (about €92) in materials for the move that sets the mood for the whole room.
Arches in a 1970s house sound like they should feel dated. They don’t. In an all-white new-looking kitchen, they’d look out of place. In this one, they’re the thing that makes every other choice make sense.
The green cabinets nobody expected
Rental kitchens are almost always white. It’s the default because it’s safe, it looks bright in photos, and nobody complains about it.
Shannon spent $4,000 (about €3,700) on Hampton Bay Designer Series cabinets from Home Depot and painted the bottom ones a deep green. The top ones stayed white. She saved money by measuring and ordering everything herself, so the contractor only had to put them in.
The green is the first thing your eye lands on. It gives the room some weight, while the white cabinets up top keep it from feeling like a dark cave. That’s the trick most people miss when they try a moody kitchen. Keep the dark stuff low, keep the light stuff high.
She kept the whole moody feel calm by using black around the sink, on the cabinet handles, and on the hood over the stove. Nothing shouts. It all just adds up.
Five lights instead of one
The old fluorescent light did what those lights always do. It buzzed. It made everything under it look flat. It made the whole room feel like an office break room.
Most people pull out the bad ceiling light and put in a nicer ceiling light. Done. Shannon put in five different lights instead.
Two round globe lights that hang down over the island. A matching one over the sink. A long low light over the kitchen table. Small strip lights tucked under the top cabinets for early mornings and late nights. Two small wall lights on either side of a piece of old artwork.
That’s the difference between a kitchen that feels like a workroom and one you actually want to sit and hang out in. Having a few different lights instead of just one big overhead is one of the biggest upgrades you can make in an old kitchen, and hardly anyone talks about it.
The little stuff that makes it feel like a home
A few smaller touches do a lot of quiet work. A wood panel with skinny vertical lines on the front of the island, painted the same green as the bottom cabinets using a small paint sprayer. Counters with a soft, bumpy finish that feels a little bit like leather instead of shiny glass. Dining chairs with woven rattan backs. A dining table with an old-timey shape. And a vintage print of Vladimir Tretchikoff’s “The Green Lady” that she found at an antique mall in Salt Lake City.
None of it is fancy or expensive on its own. Together, it’s the reason the room feels like it belongs to a real person, not a rental listing.
And here’s the part nobody expects
Shannon didn’t build this kitchen for herself. She built it as a furnished rental, the kind travel nurses and other traveling workers book for a month at a time. Those folks stay in a lot of plain beige apartments, and plain beige is what most landlords give them.
When she walks people through the house, the kitchen is the room they can’t stop talking about. Not the bedrooms. Not the living room. The room she was dreading most, the one every designer would’ve told her to tear out and paint white, is the reason people want to sign the lease.
Which is worth thinking about for a second. If a deep green, arched, cozy 1970s kitchen is what wins over renters who are only staying a month at a time, maybe the problem was never the ’70s kitchen. Maybe it was the advice to erase it.
Would you have kept the old-school bones or gone bright white? Curious where you’d land on this one.
The post Designers said gut the ’70s kitchen. She did the opposite and made it the coziest room in the house appeared first on Trendir.