January 18, 2012

Kitchen Makeover Pictures

Since gutting our kitchen for new custom cabinets was not in our budget, I settled for painting our existing cabinets. Our old cabinets had a country look with the grainy wood showing through the varnish. They're cheap with only the fronts and doors being actual wood, but standard issue for homes like ours. There's nothing completely objectionable about these cabinets, but their appearance definitely didn't do anything for my downstairs. Here are some "before" shots that I snapped just before we started dismantling.
One of the biggest kitchen improvements we did was replacing our sink and faucet with a deeper sink and taller, sleeker faucet. Mr. Morgan and Dad replaced the sink over the Christmas holiday. My "before" shots were after the sink replacement, but imagine a shallow, ugly, barely-functional-for-washing-dishes sink.
After four days of labor-intensive work, the newly painted cabinet doors were back in place. I spent several more days rearranging the stuff in the cabinets and paring down to what I decided I couldn't live without.
I worked hard to eliminate all unnecessary items from my countertops, since counter space is so limited.
Our black appliances seem to pair much better with the new colors of the cabinets.
I opted for a minimal amount of stuff on the fridge. Sometimes it's easy to get carried away with pictures, the kids' masterpieces, and reminders.
I feel like I'm cooking in a whole new kitchen.
I reorganized my spices, oils, and vinegars, moving them away from the heat of my stove. I love the way the new labels turned out, and I decided to keep only my most-used spices on this rack. The other seldom-used spices are in the cabinet in a basket. Yes, they're in alphabetical order. Is there a better order?
The drawer pulls and door handles are the same ones; we installed them soon after we moved in. However, with the painted surfaces the modern pulls and handles show up so much better.
I'm so thankful for my revamped kitchen--and especially for my parents who watched the boys for five days and for Mr. Morgan who helped on his day off, lived in a mess for close to a week, and endured fried eggs for several dinners in a row.

9 comments:

  1. Gray, your kitchen looks amazing! I love the colors you picked for the cabinets. We have been wanting to paint ours for over a year now - maybe looking at your finished product will motivate me! :)

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    1. Kelly, send your kiddos to stay with your mom, and you and Wes could totally do it! Just be prepared that you'll probably be working all day for many days. My Pandora stations got a workout that week!

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  2. Wow -- it looks great and I'm so impressed that y'all tackled the painting, etc yourselves! Look at this link -- your re-do brought to mind this re-do that I remember reading about: http://blog.urbangrace.com/2009/a-kitchen-intervention/

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    1. Brantley, it was a big job but doable. I did salivate at all the pictures of your new kitchen! I loved the kitchen redo at Urban Grace--similar to mine but even better. And I loved Cottage Living magazine; I was so sorry to see it stop.

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  3. Looks SOOO good! Did you have to sand them before you painted? We are trying to decide what to do w/ ours.

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    1. Yes, I cleaned all the to-be-painted surfaces with TSP (a heavy-duty grease cleaner), sanded all the surfaces, primed them, and then put two coats of paint on. The guy at Sherwin Williams told me I'd need to caulk the inset, but after caulking the first set of doors, we decided the primer and paint did a good-enough job of filling the small gap. For my size kitchen, I completed 1/4 of the cabinets from cleaning to painting in one day--working all day. So it took me four days to finish, since only one day (my shortest working day) did I have help from Mr. Morgan.

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    2. My reply makes it sound like Mr. Morgan didn't help! He did help--so much!! But he had to work three of the days that I worked on the cabinets, so he helped me do other things like paint the walls and install the sink and awesome garbage disposer.

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  4. Your kitchen is so streamlined now and beautiful! I love it!!

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  5. Thanks for commenting on my kitchen on Remodelaholic! I replied on there - but just in case - I wanted to say I love your kitchen too! The green looks very nice! I also like the molding on top -- I need to do that in my kitchen! :) xo, Reannah

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