[upbeat music]

I’m Jess McGurn, and I blog at Bright Green Door.

It’s a place where I chronicle renovations and home projects, and hopefully inspire readers to create a home that they love.

We live in a traditional ‘50s ranch.

Everything’s on one floor, and it’s not very big, but I love having everything close together, and it’s just perfect for our family.

When we moved into this house, it had been vacant for ten years, and the last kitchen remodel was in the late ‘80s.

Everything felt really creamy and yellow. One of the first things I did was paint the cabinets black, because I love the drama of dark cabinets.

But it started to feel kind of dark in the kitchen, and so I reached a point where I wasn’t sure how I was gonna bring more light into the kitchen, and that’s where the idea of skylights came from.

I love clean, modern design, and our kitchen – I wanted it to feel modern, which is hard to do when you’re working with old cabinets in an older home, but with the skylights, it just brought so much light into the space that I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted with the rest of the kitchen, and it highlighted everything.

I have three brass pendant lights.

I have a moody-green kitchen island and then butcher-block countertops, and all of that contrast just looks amazing with the frame of the black cabinets behind it.

Before installing the skylights, the kitchen was just a means to an end, a place where we cooked and did dishes, and no one wanted to spend additional time there.

Now I find my kids sitting at the kitchen island to do homework.

I find myself just enjoying all that natural light in there.

And it’s just created just a welcoming, bright atmosphere.