Kitchen Face Lift

Happy Monday! I hope you had a lovely weekend. Spring is finally in the air! If you’re like me that means, in part: cleaning, upgrading and renovating! Last spring we decided to give our kitchen a face lift, so in lieu of an outfit post, I wanted to share some photos today!

You see, our kitchen has “good bones.” It’s a large room, but was made with cheap, builder-grade materials. Here’s what our kitchen looked like when we moved into our house:

Not horrible–in fact: a blank slate! It was nothing to write home about, though, that’s for sure! As you can see, this is one of the photos from the for sale listing.

As soon as we moved in (back at the end of 2010), I painted the walls…

The color is called Oregano and it’s a Behr Premium paint color.

Last year, I decided that I was ready for another change–and more importantly ready to utilize the space a little better!

So, we removed all the cabinet doors, painted the cabinet frames and started priming the walls…

Goodbye Oregano!!

Hello, Fresh Praline!

Meanwhile, my poor husband was stuck in the garage, painting the cabinet doors…

He already has an air compressor, so we just bought a paint spraying gun and a couple gallons of Benjamin Moore Advance paint. This process took a LONG time–about 4 weeks of painting every weekend. You can’t see it here, but we set up a whole paint booth and had a method that consisted of three “sets” of cabinet doors. One set was lined up against one plastic-lined wall, another set was on a ladder in the the sunshine (to help dry) and the other was against this wall (getting ready for another coat of paint). We put two coats of paint on the fronts and backs of each door. This photo was taken pretty close to the end.

After we finished painting the doors, we installed some nickel hardware because fingers + white cabinets = potentially gross.

After a few long months of waiting for our contractor (who just happens to be one of Steve’s best friends) to be free, I finally took to Home Depot with my paint chip in hand to find flooring, counter-tops and the tile for our tile back splash. Here’s what I decided:

Four very long days later, my kitchen was finally complete.

I’m sorry I don’t have more photos of the process, but the face lift only took about four (yes, FOUR!) days and I was in a constant state of going back to Home Depot to pick up this, that or the other thing and trying to navigate my way around the kitchen appliances that we had to move into the living room.

When it was finished, I sat at my new kitchen island and just took it all in. During the facelift, my house was a mess and I was cranky, but in retrospect it was an extremely short amount of time and my kitchen. Whew. I freaking LOVE it.