i’m dreaming of a white kitchen::part 1

i blame southern living magazine.

i love this kitchen.  i love the classic white cupboards, the wood floors, the large, paned windows, and the black accents.  it’s timeless look, but it’s also got that great farmhouse feel with the pendant light fixtures.

painting the kitchen has been on the radar for a year or so….our cabinets are starting to look pretty shabby and worn in places.  but it fell under the heading of “things to decided after kelsey graduates from college”.  tripp and i’ve been doing some serious talking about whether we want to stay in this house or downsize.  but we love our neighborhood so much.  and we’ve put so much time and energy into making our house a place we love coming home to.  so, at least for now, we’re going to stay.

so paint the kitchen it is.  and i’m taking this week off work to do it.  i wouldn’t really call this a ‘renovation’ per se…it’s more like a refresh…like a microdermabrasion and botox….or something like that.

at any rate, just for grins i thought it would be fun to show you what the kitchen looked like when we bought the house in november 2005.

see that brown door by the back door?  that was a bathroom.  in the middle of the kitchen.

and the layers and layers of old wallpaper.

 

i especially loved the duck wall paper border.  this wall is the backside of the bathroom.

redoing the kitchen was our number one priority and we started construction that spring. the first order of business was to take out the bathroom to make room for a kitchen island. our contactors also removed all of the lath and plaster from the main wall in the kitchen.

 

next they began framing in our island and adding new wiring.

living in our house during our kitchen renovation was super fun.

<<insert sarcasm here>>

next the cabinets were installed.

then the countertops, final trim work, and fixtures were installed.

 

then tripp and i started painting.  that mossy green was the first color i painted my kitchen.

since then there has also been a lighter, sage green paint color.  followed by the light tan color we have now.

if you’re keeping count, this is the fourth time i’ll be painting my kitchen.  but i think it’s interesting the trend…from bold, contrasty color to a lighter, softer palette. seems like i’ve been working my way to a white kitchen for a while now.

at any rate, in addition to painting the walls, i’m also painting my cupboards. back when we designed and picked out our cabinets, the glazed style was really popular.  and considering that i was still very much a devotee to the french county style it seemed like a good choice.  i liked the charm and character of the antiqued look – it’s what we had at our old house in the ‘burbs.  but one of the things that i’ve learned about living in a 100 year-old house is that they have plenty of ‘charm’ and ‘character’ all on their own without needing to augment it.

in our most recent bathroom renovation, we went with a non-glazed, painted white cabinet {behr, eggshell cream, w-d-300 – the same color as the trim throughout the whole house} and i have been really happy with the look.  so that was incentive enough for me to bite the bullet and paint our kitchen cabinets.  but it’s a bit of a process.

today i started by removing all the cabinet doors and hardware.

in the hopes that it would make putting them back up as seamless as possible, i also labeled the hinges with which door they belonged to.  i also put them in baggies to hopefully keep from losing any of the screws.

because of the finish of my cabinets, i can’t just start painting.  so today i used this deglossing/sanding liquid on the fronts and back of all the doors and drawers.

today i also filled in all the nail holes…of which there were many.  and i started taping off the kitchen eating area….for the fourth time.

my game plan for tomorrow is to first brush one light coat of paint just in the glazed areas of the cabinet doors.  then spray the entire cabinet door with a second coat of paint.

{here is where it is extremely helpful to have a husband who works in the coatings industry!}

so that’s it for today….i’ll report back with tomorrow’s progress!

love, kelly