Perhaps the most daring room of Robyne Curry's house, the kitchen has red cabinets against butter-yellow walls and granite-like counters. An antique hutch adds a touch of formality.

But Curry saw past the outward impediments to the house's potential. Besides, the 1913 structure was in her price range, and the convenient location kept her in the city, where she wanted to live.

Five years later, the neglected little house has become a loved little home. Outside, the steel bars are gone. Vinyl siding has been added. The roof and nearly all the windows have been replaced. New paint coats the trim and front porch.

But the most substantial changes have occurred inside the 1,700-square-foot structure. Rooms have been stripped to the studs, reshaped and transformed. Most recently, a vibrant kitchen has emerged from a drab, timeworn one.

Despite the extensive, ongoing remodeling and redecorating, Curry admits she never had an overall plan for how she hoped to transform the eight-room house. When she bought it, the only thing she knew immediately was that the dining room walls would be ruby red — her favorite color. Beyond that, the renovation has occurred almost piecemeal as Curry has experimented, dreamed, planned and grown confident in her sense of remodeling and decorating.

Some decisions have come fairly easily. In the living room, for instance, there was no need to rebuild the room. The last thing she wanted to tamper with were the classic wooden columns separating that room from the dining room, or the built-in bookcases flanking the fireplace.

Above: Glass doors open into the 270-square- foot master bedroom upstairs. Right: In the library, floral prints and soft colors reflect Curry's interest in English-cottage décor.

But the living room clearly needed new paint. The challenge was to find a color to complement an R.C. Gorman lithograph of four Native-American women, to hang on the wall opposite the front door.

"For some reason, my mind latched onto sapphire blue," Curry says. "I tried to move away from it because I'm not a `blue' person. But I finally gave in to it."

Curry took things slowly as she decided what needed to be done, room by room. The result is a home that reflects her eclectic personality as surely as does her participation in a knitting circle, in playing the French horn, in bowling on a league or in writing personal essays destined eventually for a book.

Curry might have come to home ownership late in life — she was 41 when she bought this house - but when it happened, it happened with splash, dash and panache. In the process, she discovered she has a talent for decorating, and for knowing what's needed to make a house fit a homeowner's lifestyle. She intends to take classes in interior design and see where that leads.

Meanwhile, though, Curry's house is her laboratory. She is always experimenting, planning, pushing the envelope — or, more accurately, pushing down the walls.

That's what happened when Curry pondered the second floor. Originally, a long, narrow staircase led up to a small landing with doors into two small bedrooms. Her plan: Tear down the wall between the bedrooms, take both down to the studs and begin fresh with wallboard and new wiring — and oh, yes, install a toilet and sink in what had been a closet.

Two years later, a shower was added to complete the tiny bathroom, and Curry now has an expansive 270-square-foot master-bedroom suite that fits her desire for spaciousness. "It doesn't have to be the Grand Canyon," she says, "but I do like a lot of space."

When it came time to remodel the first-floor bathroom, Curry decided it needed more than a cosmetic touchup. So it, too, was taken down to the studs. The vanity was moved and the toilet turned, a 2-foot privacy wall placed between them. A new tub was installed, and the old tile surround was replaced with cultured marble.

Curry's latest, and largest, remodeling project — a total kitchen redo — was completed last summer by Potter Construction Inc. The old kitchen was a model of inefficiency. The refrigerator was at the east end of the room in an alcove; the stove was at the opposite end. Curry's solution was to eliminate the wall between the kitchen and alcove, set the stove and refrigerator side by side across from the sink, and install a door at the east end leading to a new backyard deck.

The kitchen now features raised-panel, red-stained cabinets reaching to the ceilings 9 feet above the floor. False-front red cabinetry camouflages most of the appliances — even the washer and dryer, which had been in the unfinished basement. The Marmoleum flooring, Corian counters and backsplash tiles have purple and blue hues, picking up some of the colors in the living room. An antique hutch stands in one corner.

"I wanted to add one element in the kitchen that really, truly was furniture," Curry says. Admitting she's not fond of cooking, Curry chuckles when explaining that she likes to think of a kitchen "as a living room with appliances."

Curry's use of a red stain on the cabinets from International Kitchens in Bellevue was "very rare," says Gary Potter, whose West Seattle company does residential remodeling throughout the Greater Seattle area. "We call her courageous."

Potter's carpenters turned the home's original fir door between the kitchen and dining room into a space-saving sliding pocket door. A panel near the top of the door was replaced with what now is one of the home's showpieces: a stained-glass panel of red and yellow flowers, designed by Curry. The panel hints of English-cottage décor — not surprising because Curry admits to a growing interest in that theme.

In fact, when Curry redid her first-floor library at the same time as the kitchen project, the result was perhaps less library and more garden room, even with one wall given over to new floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Remodeling and redecorating can be expensive, says Curry, who has worked as an editor at Microsoft and a news producer at Corbis, a digital-archive company. "But I'm comfortable not going on vacations or buying clothes like I used to do. I love making my house the way I want it to be. I don't decorate it to be a showplace. I do it because it gives me pleasure.

"I love being at home."

Steve Pierce is a Tacoma writer and former Seattle Times editor. Steve Ringman is a Seattle Times staff photographer.