Kitchen Makeover

So you’ve seen the cute little place we call home, but as you may have noticed I didn’t get TOO much into the interior details of that cute little split-entry we love so much.  Well that would be because those details are each posts of their own.

Now you’re probably thinking I lied to you, after all I did mention that the cute little split-entry (we need to give this place a name) was by no means a fixer upper, and that is the truth, except for one dirty little secret…. the kitchen.

That’s right, the kitchen took a whole lot of  “I can see past this it’s all going to be okay” vision when we walked through, but we were so happy with the rest of the house we were certain this was a fixable mishap.

You’re curious, you wanna know right?  What is she talking about?  What was SO bad about this kitchen.  We’ve all seen the classic outdated kitchen, or the dirty oh so dirty everything but that’s not it.  No, you see this particular homeowner loved colour, she loved bright, bold and somewhat out-of-place colours and though this may have worked for her, it was not working for us!

So, hold your breath, here she goes……

Check out this beauty!

Can you believe what you’re seeing?  I bet you can’t, you are totally in stimulation overload right now.  Whoa those are yellow cabinets! Whoa that is a yellow cabinet green accented kitchen! Wait is that green bead board, yes, yes it is! HOLD ON, those are the awful 70s wood handle cabinets painted yellow.

So, now that you are all thinking, what the hell did you go and get yourselves into, yes it was that bad!  Are you wondering how we saw past this? Well at the time we were thinking CABINET REFACING!!!! Easy enough, we will buy new doors and since the interior of the cabinets was all left alone (thank you thank you thank you) it would be easy enough, bye-bye ugly yellow wood handled doors yellow bright white kitchen!

Well….. have you looked into how much cabinet refacing is? Or even how much it is to simply buy new cabinet doors? Well it is minimal savings when compared to a whole new kitchen and since these cabinets don’t go to the ceiling, the counter is not so hot and the appliance will eventually meet their maker, we decided there was no point dumping that money into new doors and decided to tackle the kitchen all at once.

But not yet.

Let’s be serious, we had not budgeted for a BRAND NEW KITCHEN soooooo I decided paint! So with a little paint, paint and more paint, we had a new kitchen…. well almost.

With a little hard work, a lot of primer and paint, and some serious patience, we created this! It is in no way perfect but it is 150 times better than the green and yellow disaster that we had before.

I know you are probably wondering, what happened to the white kitchen vision, but since we decided to paint we figured a darker colour would provide better coverage (and an all around easier job) and so we went with a dark dark brown that would match our dining room table!

We started by removing all the doors and priming everything.  We used Stix Primer, it provides an extra sticky surface for the paint to stick to (get it, stix?!).  We primed the doors and all the cabinet boxes that were a lovely shade of green as well as the bead board.

I used the very high-tech system of balancing each door on paint cans, when I ran out of those I used apple juice cans and after that tomato cans.  It was quite a complicated system.  But in all seriousness this system allowed me to paint the edges and the face all at once, and since they hadn’t painted the inside of the cabinets (aside from some sloppy paint smudges) I pretty much could leave the inside of the doors alone

After the primer was allowed to dry over a weekend, I set to painting.  We used Benjamin Moore’s ADVANCE in 2134-10 “Night Horizon”.  Now I will tell you that this isn’t cheap but it is so worth it.  With one good coat and one additional light touch up we were good to go.

Originally we planed to reface the cabinets on our own before painting to give them the shaker door look but we realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as expected with the awful wood handles so we opted to just paint the whole thing for now.  I should mention that Patrick and I decided that since we were just painting we would add hardware and that would help both improve the look and the functionality of the cabinets.  Patrick set to drilling all the holes in the doors and drawers between the prime and paint stages.

The most important thing to remember here is that this particular brand of paint dries with an enamel finish but it takes a very very very very very very very long time.  The longer you can leave them sit the better.  I think my patience was exhausted around a day and half or so and we set to hanging the door back up but in reality they should have set for another day and a half to be completely un tacky.  It takes another 30-60 days for them to dry to their enamel finish.

Check out the review of one of my all time favourites bloggers (ok, my all time favourite), Katie Bower who used the same paint to tackle their kitchen makeover (which is MUCH MUCH more impressive than ours!!!

And there you have it, our simple (ha!) kitchen redo.  I know it isn’t much but it makes the world of difference, I mean we can actually sleep at night without the ominous green and yellow glow from the one side of the house!

Before

After