Kitchen Update, Part I

Warning: Longest. Post. Ever. Lots. Of. Periods. For. Emphasis.

I have been waffling back and forth about painting the cabinets forever. I hated to be the person to paint over wood, but the more I looked at it, the more I saw fabulous cottage-y potential in cabinets that were, shall we say, past their prime.

My mom came to watch Ava while Mr. Wonderful and I went away for our anniversary, so I seized the opportunity to have her stay and help me with this special project. As I have mentioned before, my mom is a powerhouse at projects and I knew she'd help me get the job done.

Since I forgot she was going to take off the doors while we were gone, I didn't get a proper before shot, but these should give you the idea: Notice that we got new hardware but not new hinges...

After the doors were off:

My naive self with the profile sander before we started, thinking "We'll get these puppies done in a jiffy!"

The knotty pine was covered with what seemed to be two coats of a thick shellac. We ended up getting 60 grit sandpaper and a lot of elbow grease for the frames and using a new sander to do the doors in the garage. I seriously thought I had carpal tunnel that night. We sanded for about 6 hours. Any thoughts I was entertaining about painting the trim (which has the same finish) have vanished. We didn't just rough up the surface, we took it all off and it looked like this:

We did an oil based primer (Kilz) and two coats of semi gloss latex paint (didn't want to spring for the $50/gallon cabinet paint). On the inside we did yellow to match our walls. We just got a cheapo brand for that. We matched it to Behr Pale Daffodil. For the outside we picked Behr Parmesan (worst name ever, but it seemed to have the crispness of white while still being off-white).

This is my amazing mom painting the tricky spots in our makeshift workspace. This woman is in her 60s people. No joke.

The insides are so cheery! Inspired by a post from the Nester.

I decided to take some of the doors off on top and replace them with baskets. I love the variety and also those top doors are so wide and short that they didn't really hang right. I kept the middle ones because there's a recessed light in there.

We spray painted our existing hinges. Cheap. But again, some of our doors aren't quite fitting the same way they used to. It's kind of chancy to change up old cabinetry like this, but I think we'll be able to tweak it.

We chose this hardware a couple years ago, because the old hardware didn't have standard measurements. The new hardware curves in and covers up the old holes.

I love this little cutout in white!

Overall, I love the painted look. It makes our kitchen much brighter, and just overall looks better. However, Mr. Wonderful and I agree that we need some more contrast, because now our floors, counter top, back splash, cupboards and ceiling are essentially all the same color, which isn't to our taste. The counter top and back splash need to be replaced anyway, so the plan is to work in some color/contrast there. We decided to keep our sink and just do this as cheaply as possible.