Kitchen overhaul, PART 2

Where was I, oh yes, the wallpaper is down and the paint is up, it’s onto phase two, the cabinets. We had recently been following a blog called Young House Love, two DIYers in Richmond who are an ambitions young couple that are remodeling their house room by room. Lucky for us, they give pointers and instructions on how they were able to accomplish their renovations, and one of them just happened to be “how to paint your kitchen cabinets.” With the internet at our disposal, we were ready to give it a go. Now, before I begin, I have to admit I was scared to death. If we mess this up, we’ll have to replace all the cabinets and start over, which as you may know, is not cheap.

We first took off all the doors and drawers, the hinges and the hardware, stacked them up in the basement and sanded everything down. In case you are wondering, we had 8 drawers, and 22 doors. 22! Sanding and cleaning the doors ended up taking us all day, because we wanted to make sure that we got everything as prepped as possible. Like a fool, I didn’t take any photos of this, sorry. Next we needed to decide on what hardware we wanted to go with. We both hated the brass that was on the doors already, so off to home depot (again) to take a look. The shocker were the hinges. We looked at them and realized that we’ll need to buy 44 hinges, and looking at the price, each hinge was just over $3. So, in hinges alone, we were already in a bit of a dollar shock. The good news is that we didn’t realize that each packet of hinges actually contains 2, so we were back to ONLY having to buy 22, but still, ugh. We found a few ideas at the depot, and went back with plan in hand. The major change would be the the doors would have a knob instead of the handle they currently have, so we would need to fill all the other holes before beginning to prime and paint. BACK to home depot we go, pick up some winmax woodfiller, and some oil based primer. Now, this process of filling and priming took several days, and I mean full days, to get everything ready just for the paint. Once everything was filled and primed, we busted out our favorite white color (Behr’s Polar bear), and started painting.

It took us 3 coats, on each side. So, it was paint everything on one side, wait overnight for it to dry. Paint it again, wait, paint it again, wait. As you can imagine, it took a while.To complicate everything else, and to go along with our poor planning, we decided to take care of one of those other small details at the same time, the floor. You remember the white laminate, well, just as we were about halfway through the project, we had new hardwood delivered to the house and ready to be installed.

So once the hardwood was installed (since we couldn’t access the kitchen for about a week), it was time to lay the drop cloths down and get to painting the cabinets. I am personally glad we waited until the floors were in, just because there was a lot of dust in the air, and to think that any of that would have gotten stuck in the paint would have really been bad. So, the floors are in, the cabinets are painted, and now we have to wait a few days until we hang the doors.

Looks vastly different, doesn’t it? Well, before I give you the final reveal (of course you could just scroll down), let me give you a small reminder of what it looked like before. Ready?

BEFORE:

and of course, AFTER:

To say it looks different is an understatement. We couldn’t be happier with how this all turned out. The kitchen is easily one of my favorite places in this whole house now. Before, I hated it. I hated everything about it, except the size, now I love it all. There are still two or three small things to be done in here, mainly putting up some trim around the tops of the cabinets, but that is all minor when you consider what we have done so far. I’ll be sure to include those updates as we do them, but for now, we really hope you like what we’ve done.