My kitchen looked a little something like this.
When we moved into our house three years ago, we quickly painted the yellow cabinets white and the yellow walls sage green. And then we went about our merry way for the next three years. Until, last month, when I decided this kitchen just wasn't "floating my boat" anymore. So, I sent my hubs and the kiddos away for a weekend and painted my laminate counter tops. (I know we've already talked about that little adventure, and how happy I was with the results, but really that is where this whole story begins!) After painting the counter tops, this is what I ended up with:
It looked great. I was in love with my new counter tops. But a new situation arose in the process. Check it out:
yuckiness!
We took all of the cabinets down and got out the electric sander. As soon as we started layers of paint began peeling off! Oh, NO! Sanding was clearly NOT going to work. We discussed and decided that the better route might be to try to strip the cabinets. I ran to the local hardware store, bought a can of stripper and was excited to watch the paint start bubbling away. It was like a really cool high school chemistry demonstration. I was thinking this was going to work. However, after three strips, there was still paint on the cabinets. They looked a little something like this:
There was much-too-much paint left on there to simply paint over. The surface was rough and yucky (I seem to be using that word a lot in conjunction with my old kitchen.) We discussed the amount of time and stripper it would take to remove all of the layers of paint, and decided that it would be a lot of work and money and we probably still wouldn't be happy with the out-come.
Time to explore other options! Our cabinets had routered edges. We needed to figure out a way to re-face the cabinets, and make the edges work. More bead board, here we come! I sanded down all of the cabinet edges as much as possible to make them smooth while my husband cut trim pieces and bead board. We used Liquid Nails to attach the bead board to the cabinets and drawers.
And more Liquid Nails to attach trim around each one. We used masking tape to hold them together while the Liquid Nails "set." We literally had tape holding our whole kitchen together.
Since we had brand new faces on our cabinets, why not replace the handles? My husband has always hated the old ones and now we could get any size we wanted since there was no concern over matching up old screw holes. I went for the brushed nickle small sash pulls.
What had started so small and simple, quickly snowballed into a giant four day project, (My husband was pretty sure I was trying to kill him when I selected the handles that had 4 screws EACH in them) but I could not be more thrilled with the outcome! The entire project (including the counter tops) came in at about $200, and gave us a whole new look.
Wait a minute! Did someone say something about a new tile floor?!?
...and the kitchen saga continues...
