Kitchen overhaul, PART 1

I promise I’ll do my best to keep up with the site, now that I have actually found a layout I like. So a lot of people Have been asking to see what we have done in the kitchen, and well, it’s 95% done. So, let’s take a tour of what we did. First, it’s important to understand how bad the kitchen was, sooooo, here is your before picture:

Notice the green walls that were so nicely sponge painted so there are varying shades of green, the amazing(ly horrible) apple wallpaper border to remind you that you are indeed in a “country” kitchen and the out dated wood cabinets with brass hardware. I’ll be 100% honest, I am not a fan of brass or gold or anything in that color spectrum. So our plan was pretty simple, or so we thought, we’ll paint the walls, paint the cabinets and replace the hardware. Oh, and then there were a few “minor” details we needed to address, mainly the floor and the ceiling.

The lovely white laminate floors (that were improperly installed) had to go, as did the florescent light that reminded me of sitting in my office, not a feeling you want while cooking dinner. With plan in hand, we decided to hit the ground running. We knew with 100% certainty, we wanted the light GONE. I called a local electrician who came out and ripped down the light and installed new recessed lighting. He also ran a new circuit for the microwave that would replace the hood above the stove.

With that out of the way, it was time to remove the wallpaper border. How hard could this be, I mean, it’s just a border. Yeah…it was hard, very very hard. We tried everything in the book to get this stuff to come off. First, we used Dif, a product made specifically for removing wallpaper, so naturally that seems like a winner. After scoring the wallpaper with our handy “paper tiger,” we sprayed the dif and waited. Then after about 20 minutes or so, we took to the scraper. An hour later, we had removed a small strip about a foot long. This is about when we knew we were in trouble.

We tried a few other options, but nothing was working. My friend Mike happened to be in town that day, so he swung by to lend us a hand. Poor sucker didn’t know what he was in for. We kept at it for hours, and then we decided to call Mike’s Mom who had experience with this, so she said to just try warm soapy water. Seems a bit pedestrian, but hell, we’ll give it a go…and so we did. Wouldn’t you know it, it actually worked pretty well.

Thanks to Trish, we were back in business! The wall paper was down, the holes got patched, and now it was time to paint and get rid of this green, for good. The only problem…we didn’t have a clue as to what color we wanted to paint it, and believe it or not, we were actually considering….green. One thing was for certain though, no matter what color we picked, we NEEDED to prime these walls first. And prime we did, giving us a stark all white kitchen. Now, time to paint! Off to our local home depot to pull sample colors, a lot of them. We came home and put them on the wall and still couldn’t make a decision. Finally, we went with our gut…Behr’s misty surf, a blue-ish grey color.

Now that the easy part (HA!) is done, it was time for us to move onto painting the cabinets. I’ll save that for part 2