Kitchen Cabinet Redo

When we bought our house last May (almost a year ago!), we knew we wanted to redo the cabinets. They were brand new but the color the seller stained them, wasn't very pretty. It was a pinky-orangey color. Yuk. So by July, I had had enough and I took myself to Home Depot to talk to their paint guy for some ideas. He really helped us out a lot in deciding which type of paint to use, and how to go about the transformation overall. Here are some before pictures:

Yeah, sorry about that mess. I'm embarrassed I just showed you that.

But first we used a liquid sander to remove any residue and prep the cabinets to be primed. For our primer we used Glidden Interior/Exterior White Primer/Gripper. For our paint color, we used Behr Premium Plus Ultra Pure White in Clear Moon-Semi Gloss.

Hunter hates white cabinets. He wanted to re stain them. I originally wanted to do the upper cabinets a light sage green color and the bottom cabinets a shade darker. We ultimately decided on white cabinets because the kitchen is so dark and we thought it would brighten the space up. Also, the two-toned cabinets may not be good in a resale. We plan on being here for about 2 more years and we decided that in our  next home we will do what we really want. I will say, we are very happy with the final look of the cabinets.

So next it was time to take off all the cabinet doors and take out the drawers. I cannot stress how important it is to number your doors and drawers as you take them off. Make sure to put the same number on the door/drawer and the place where it goes. Otherwise, when your are finished painting, you are going to have to try to put together a puzzle....not fun.

So once you have all the drawers and doors off, it's time to prime and paint!

Looking back, I can't believe how big of a mess my house was during this process. And now for the final transformation:

I really like how it turned out, but we are definitely not done with the kitchen. In the picture above, you can see where I didn't finish painting the section by the stove. There is a big gap between the cabinets and the stove so we are going to fill it in and you won't even see that part. And two pictures up, there is a beautiful piece of plywood over the dishwasher. You see, when we bought this house, the seller had remodeled the entire house. But no appliances were included. And for some odd reason, the seller didn't even include a space for a dishwasher. I'm not really sure why? It's 2012. Who doesn't have a dishwasher? So we had to extend the counter tops. The problem with that? We can't find the tiles that the seller used. So what does that mean? We have to completely redo the counter tops and backsplash. BUT I will say that we aren't in love with what we have now. So we have picked out what we want for our new counter tops and backsplash and are currently saving for it. Hunter and his dad are experienced in installing counter tops so we are going to save LOTS of money by them doing it instead of hiring someone. We are hoping to only spend about $500 on them so hopefully we can get by with that. I think we are also going to put another cabinet above the dishwasher where there is an empty space. So overall we spent about $150-200 on this redo. That includes the deglosser, primer, paint, paintbrushes/rollers, and cabinet and drawer handles and knobs.
Hopefully we will get to our counter tops within the next month or two. I will share the redo with you when it's done!
Jessica