The New Kitchen, Part 3

Thank you for coming back for part 3 of the kitchen remodel series. As you'll recall, I've updated the flooring with some inexpensive peel and stick vinyl tile, changed out all the pulls on the cabinets and drawers and started dreaming of bigger changes. As I mentioned in the last post, a job fell into my lap so I worked a few hours, stashed away some cash and started dreaming of bigger changes.

I know what you're saying, "Holy moly, that must be SOME job to make enough for a whole new kitchen in just a couple of months in your spare time." Wellllll, ok, it's not a whole new kitchen but it'll look like one when I'm finished.

The first thing I did was head off to Home Depot to wander the aisles kid-free. Yes, I left O with the hubs and headed out on a fact finding mission. I priced plywood, trim, beadboard and everything else I passed along the way as my mind spun out of control with ideas. Finally I wandered into the kitchen showroom area and really examined all the different styles. I asked one of the guys sitting at the desk what he thought about my design options based on the size of our kitchen and style of our home. He pointed out some great pros and cons of the different options I was looking at and ultimately I settled on just adding a frame around each door to give it some architectural interest. I returned to the show kitchen with this same detail and studied up.

I headed back home to ponder as I often do with larger projects and over the next few days I realized that I couldn't purchase pre-cut trim because the trim on my drawers would have to be narrower than the trim on the cabinet doors or the proportion would be all wrong. In the end, I opted to purchase a sheet of 1/8 inch thick plywood and cut the strips for the trim on my own. I cut 2 inch as well as 1 1/4 inch strips.

I started with one double-door freestanding upper cabinet to give myself a good inspiration piece. I took off the cabinet door, glued down custom trim to the face of it, routered it, sanded it, primed it, painted it and voila! the first door was done.

I'm going to back up a bit though. Here's the before picture (note: this is technically a different cabinet than the first one I completed but they all look the same):

As I said, I took down the first cabinet door and started working on it (rough workspace eh?).

Then I painted it with a coat of primer, sanded it, a coat of Navajo White (Behr brand) semigloss, sanded it, then finally a top coat of the Navajo White semigloss. I used a foam roller for the top coats to avoid brush marks:

Then I hung it back up next to the old one to get a good look at where I was coming from and where I was going:

So excited to finish up this first full cabinet, I primed and painted the unit inside and out and completed the transformation of the second door:

I'm not going to lie, even I was shocked at how amazing the transformation was. I'll never forget that feeling when I realized that they actually looked good enough that this might not be a temporary fix until we can pay someone else thousands of dollars to redo it in a few years. We might actually be content with this kitchen indefinitely. I had a hard time getting to sleep that night as I dreamed of what the kitchen might look like at the end of the project. I also learned a few lessons along the way and knew I had my hands full on this one.

Tomorrow: The rest of the top cabinets (remember, this isn't real-time . . . in reality this took several weeks of evening and weekend work)

Thank you for reading

The New Kitchen, Part 1
The New Kitchen, Part 2