Faced with a black hole of a kitchen and a bear cave of a family room, the Gil family won our home improvement contest—and our kudos—for transforming a suite of particularly unpleasant 1970s rooms into light, bright, stylish spaces.

“This room was so bad, we almost moved,” says Gail Marie Gil about her home’s family room, now a smartly redesigned embrace of sunshine that beckons all to sit and relax. “It’s now what I dreamed it would be. Sometimes I cannot believe we pulled this off.”

Gail, her husband Bill, and their two sons, Sean and Ryan, were faced with an all-too-common conundrum: They had a great house, yard, and neighborhood, but also a mid-’70s interior so dark that you almost had to navigate by echolocation. In the family room, char-black, fake-wood beams hung over a smoldering orange shag carpet. Expanses of dark-chocolate-colored paneling overpowered the room’s single picture window, sucking all the sunshine from the space. The adjacent living room was even worse. “We never went in there,” says Gail. “And we felt crowded. We actually started looking at bigger houses. Yet we had all this space we never used.”

Light now pours in through a triple bank of windows and two casement windows beside the fireplace. Crisp white slipcovers and pillows made from vintage linens invite you to the window seat to soak up the sun. A cherry floor adds a warm, mellow note. This room is now where the Gils spend most of their time.

The transformation started when Gail decided to paint her kitchen cabinets white. The project spanned two years and included not only the kitchen and family room, but also a reworked living room and vestibule (see floor plan, page 130).

A decade before remodeling began, Gail, an inveterate thrift-shop browser, used to bring stuff home that she had no place for, but that she felt she had to have regardless. For years, these odds and ends were stashed in the basement.

She likes white. She likes the post-Deco simplicity of 1940s everyday furniture—porcelain-topped steel tables, white metal cabinets, a streamlined kitchen table and chairs. She likes primitive rough-and-chunky wood pieces that appear to have been weathering for years. “I’m not a refinisher,” she says. “I scrub it, seal it, and that’s that. It has more character that way.” She likes contrasts, such as the patrician gentility of white vintage linens paired with the gritty integrity of weathered wood.

Most of all, she likes a comfortable, lived-in look. Her new furniture is slipcovered in washable white cotton, creating a slightly rumpled compatibility with the antique quilts and throws that drape sofa arms. In the entry, smart white skirts dress a dark wood armchair and gateleg table.

Gail started renovations on the kitchen. “I don’t see why I can’t just paint those cabinets,” she told Bill. “I guess he figured the alternative was a $25,000 kitchen remodel, so he let me have at it,” Gail says, laughing.

“Well, it was awful!” she says. “I did all the painting—a few cabinet doors at a time—in my laundry room. Everything that had been in the kitchen was on the living room floor. Sometimes dinner was chips and a beer.”

But the process had its benefits. While prepping the cabinet doors, Gail decided to knock out several wood panels on the uppers, and replaced them with glass to better display her collection of Southwestern dinnerware.

To keep costs down, the Gils did many tasks themselves, such as adding solid-brass hardware—one hand-driven screw at a time. Gail ordered Mexican tiles for the stove backsplash, and Bill took a day off from work to help her set them. “The grout’s not perfect, but neither are the tiles,” says Gail philosophically. “We like it that way.” Bill also installed pendant lights in the eating area, and Gail hired an electrician to install task lighting for the countertops. The cost of the whole makeover job came to a few thousand dollars—much of which went for a new range.

Her advice to other remodelers: “Don’t just have someone come in and rip things up,” she says. “The time we spent thinking and planning our work really paid off. This space is perfect, exactly what we wanted it to be. We’re so happy.”

Copyright 2002 Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved.