Turquoise Kitchen Remodel Part 2: Color

Choosing a paint color for a kitchen remodel can be hard! Hello Creative Family walks through the design process of coming up with a turquoise kitchen color palette with the help of Sherwin-Williams.

---

Thank you to Sherwin-Williams, Sunrise Kitchens and Blanco for sponsoring parts of our kitchen remodel. All thoughts and opinions are our own.

---

Welcome to part 2 of our Hello Creative Family’s Turquoise Kitchen Renovation! Did you catch Part 1 where we showed some horrendous before photos? You are going to make sure you check those out!

For me, the most fun part of our kitchen renovation was the dreaming and planning phase. I’m so lucky to have a husband who supports me in everything that I do and that extended to our kitchen planning.

My husband was our budget guy and I was our dreamer girl. As we sat down and met with different suppliers I found myself often saying “I have champagne tastes and a beer budget.”

Our first big thing to book when we started planning was cabinets. In my opinion your cabinets are the central part of your design and everything else comes after.

I’ll talk more about cabinets in Part 3 of this series, but one of the biggest considerations for us when we finally made our decision about who to go with was “Can they do custom colored cabinets for us?” If the answer was no, we were pretty quick to move on. Want to know why?

I had a dream of having a kitchen with a turquoise cabinets!

Now you can probably tell just by hanging out on Hello Creative Family that I have a thing for turquoise/teal/aqua *whatever you choose to call it*, and for years I have dreamed of incorporating that into our kitchen.

When we first moved into our house we painted the front wall of our kitchen/living room a teal color in an attempt to bring my happy color into the space.

I don’t know if this makes sense, but it was almost too much. I’m sure you’re thinking “Right, a teal wall is too much but this chic plans on having turquoise cabinets?”

I’m not sure if it was because it was such a huge wall to have painted a bold color and it was the first thing you saw when you walked into the room, or if it was because the color on the other walls weren’t a nice match for it, or what… but it just wasn’t working for me.

I had a dream of turning our 80’s fixer upper townhouse from drab to fab, so I decided to start my journey for my perfect turquoise kitchen on Pinterest.

There were so many stunning kitchen’s on Pinterest and I loved them all so much, but analyzing them really helped me figure out the look I was going for.

As I started looking at photos some things popped out at me. I realized that I loved turquoise paired with white, but that I liked turquoise better on the lower part of the kitchen than top.

I realized that I really like warm wood paired with turquoise.

I realized that I wanted a turquoise island and to have the rest of my cabinets white. I also realized that there were all kinds of turquoise/teal/aqua colors and while I loved them all, that in my kitchen I wanted one that was less green…

and less blue…

… and was drawn to a color that was a really even mix of blue and green.

I realized that I loved vintage appliances… but they were probably out of my beer budget.

And that accent pieces go a long way to really creating a custom look for your kitchen.

It was this final kitchen photo that really became my gold star for what I wanted in a kitchen. I had it saved on my phone and as we went through the design process I often pulled this photo up for inspiration. My kitchen is a completely different size and layout than this one, and wanted to have my own unique kitchen not a carbon copy of someone else’s, but I found myself often pulling up this photo to show to different suppliers when selecting flooring, lighting and cabinets.

Once I had a general color palette in mind, it was time to call in Sherwin-Williams for some help finding the perfect shades. I knew that I wanted to incorporate white, turquoise and grey/stainless into our kitchen. So first I started with finding the perfect shade of turquoise/teal/aqua.

I started out by visiting my local Sherwin-Williams and narrowing down which teals were right for me. Knowing that I liked a teal that was a mix of green and blue made this process pretty easy. I was able to eliminate the ones that were too green, and too blue and concentrate on a more even mix.

We ended up coming up with two color options Mariner- SW 6766 and Tantalizing Teal- SW 6937.

I brought the two colors home and hung them on my wall. Just when I thought that one color had won out, the time of day changed, the lighting changed and I was torn again!

I also spent a lot of time moving the color swatches from one side of the kitchen to the other, seeing what they looked like in light and shadow at different times of the day.

The look I wanted to go for in our kitchen was light and bright. While I really liked both colors, I found that the Mariner just looked too dark when the sun wasn’t shining. The Sherwin-Williams color program really helped me with this process too because it let me see what the color would look like in a big space and what the paint looks like during the day versus at night. There’s even an option with their app to upload a photo of your space to fill with color.

I showed both colors to our cabinet design specialist and he agreed with my thought that Tantalizing Teal was the color for us.

Next came the really difficult decision. Yes we were having Tantalizing Teal for our island color– but what color would we paint our walls?

My husband and I were both in agreement that we wanted something more neutral. With that in mind I headed back to Sherwin-Williams and grabbed color samples of pretty much every neutral that they had.

Then my husband and I tried to narrow it down. It was so hard! I had originally thought a grey would go well, but my husband wasn’t feeling it. Pure white felt too stark to us but we liked the cleanness of it. Then we started looking at the colors that had just a hint of aqua to them.

We ended up taking all of the color swatches to my parent’s house and selected one there that we thought was “the color” but then brought it back to our house and it looked too green and The Hubs said it reminded him of a hospital.

I love that Sherwin-Williams has coordinating color suggestions for each of their paint colors and that’s ultimately how we came to our color decision. While we weren’t quite feeling the suggestions for Tantalizing Teal, we liked the coordinating color suggestion of Glimmer to go with Mariner and that’s the color we ended up going with.

I love the way the two of them look together and can’t wait to show you what our finished kitchen looks like! Make sure you come back to see Part 3 of our kitchen renovations series!

---

Are you ready to follow along on our epic Kitchen Renovation Project? Check out parts 3 and 4 below!

---

A big thank you to our sponsors for our kitchen renovation:

Sherwin-Williams

Sunrise Kitchens

Blanco

As with every article on Hello Creative Family, all thoughts and opinions are 100% our own.

Check out the other parts of our kitchen renovation project here:

Turquoise Kitchen Remodel- Part 1: Before Pictures

Turquoise Kitchen Remodel- Part 2: Color

Turquoise Kitchen Renovation Part 3: The Reveal

Turquoise Kitchen Renovation Part 4: It’s All In The Details

Planning a renovation? Make sure you check out this too!

20 Tips For A Smooth Kitchen Renovation