And here are the pictures

We came home from our vacation to find our kitchen looking like this:

Which was a lot better than how we'd left it:

Then Ken applied some primer to both the walls and ceiling and some white paint to the ceiling:

And added some light fixtures:

Ignore that unfinished wall to the right. It will become a "shear wall" and still needs some work to that end.

Then my very talented sister-in-law, Jeanne Murphy Curtis, who is principal of Bella! Design for Living, LLC, created a couple product/color schemes for us to choose from, based on the cabinetry we'd already selected and a paint swatch we'd liked. Here's the scheme we chose:

That piece of wood is a sample of our cabinets (beechwood).

The little sample lying on top of it is the laminate countertop we chose. We'll upgrade to granite or another solid-surface countertop several years down the line, but for now we're going with what's budget conscious.

The glass tile in the back, which I think is so dreamy and makes me want to be at the beach, will be our backsplash.

The big tile at the lower left is our flooring, which looks like slate (the material we'd planned to use) but is actually a porcelain tile made to look like slate. Half the price of slate and comparably durable. This was an awesome find on Jeanne's part.

Lastly, the light green paint just below the cabinet sample, the one called Mystical Sea, will be on the wall surrounding the window over the kitchen sink. That'll be the only portion of the L of cabinets with wall showing since we're going right up to the ceiling with the cabinets. So we'll need very little paint in that color. Here's a closeup:

Finally, the neutral paint swatch on the far right will tie it all together. It's a special paint from Benjamin Moore called Affinity (this color is Jute) that will color match with both cool and warm colors. This way we can put any color we want in our adjacent dining room and not worry about whether it will jibe with the kitchen tones.

We cannot wait to install all the elements in the kitchen, including my newly purchased dishwasher--Happy Mother's Day to me!--and see how it looks when finished. I'll try to be better at blogging, especially now that things are really taking off toward the finish line. Estimate to finished kitchen: 4-6 weeks!