We love our house. Sometimes, I still can’t believe it’s ours — I’m pretty grateful that life in the South is more affordable than my coastal Southern Californian upbringing! (ok ok, we’re not five minutes from the beach but we’ve got a pretty nice community pool;)
Owning a home is a privilege and allows you to dream about things you’d like to change and make your own — within reason (as my husband likes to remind me). These days, browsing Pinterest can cultivate feelings of dissatisfaction that work against feeling at rest and content with what you have. I’m definitely guilty of thinking my dream-this or my dream-that will make me happy when deep down, I know my foolish heart will always be wanting for something. I’m pretty sure when I was a kid I didn’t notice whether or not my mom’s kitchen had pristine granite countertops or open shelving with cute, perfectly stacked bowls — I just know she was there, serving and loving us with a genuine heart. I want to be like that.
Anyway — back to our kitchen! After reading this blog post, I thought ok — maybe we can do this?! I had Niall read the post too and to my surprise he immediately suggested we go for it. It’s not that we were totally unhappy, but we both knew a fresh coat of paint (or three) could give our cabinets an entirely different look which was kind of exciting. I’m not gonna lie, when we first started sanding, I thought we were in way over our heads more than a few times. It was boring, dirty, monotonous work and most of the time we were in the garage with 90+ degree heat and humidity. But, after pushing through those first few days, we knew there was no turning back!
I wish we had taken more ‘before’ photos — I snapped these shots shortly after we first moved in. But you get the gist of it in the picture below — nothing wrong with what we had, we just thought it seemed too … wood-ish?! We wanted something a little more striking that would break up the wood floors and the cabinets. We decided to take a bit of a risk and go with something two toned: ‘white veil’ for the top cupboards and ‘submarine grey’ for the bottom ones.
Ta da!
And now, I’ll share some photos that go beyond the finished product — and show more of the blood, sweat and tears that went into our first big home project:)
We began the job at the start of a weekend hoping the kids would cooperate and give us hours upon hours of uninterrupted productivity time — haha! Wishful thinking. That picnic table set up looks picture perfect but I can assure you, they sat there coloring for approximately 1.5 minutes before they were over it. We ended up hiring a babysitter to stay in the house with them for a couple of hours, but other than that we worked after they were already in bed. It was NOT EASY sacrificing our evening alone time from 8 – 10:30 pm after the kids were down, but we really wanted to finish the job before leaving for our summer CA trip. It was do or die!
Getting there…
Niall and I took turns painting that Sunday and by evening he was totally over it. But I hated the idea of yet another week night where we couldn’t just relax. We were leaving for California early Wednesday morning and I really, really wanted the kitchen put together before we left! So I hunkered down in the garage for a couple of hours Sunday night, put on a few more podcasts and endured the nasty mosquitoes that kept nipping at my legs (wearing old volleyball spandex was not a good decision — lesson learned). But sweet victory! I finished the third and final coat of white paint and the next day Niall put our kitchen back together.
It felt so good to do the finishing touches, like putting all the cabinet handles back on.
What do you think?! The finish of the cabinets isn’t perfect, but in my opinion it’s pretty darn close. We were quite pleased with ourselves and happy to have saved a few thousand bucks. Thinking of doing something similar? If you have the motivation I definitely say go for it. I’ll leave you with some tips and tricks we learned along the way — and a blurry photo that my three year old took (I nearly have a heart attack every time she holds my camera). I couldn’t resist getting a quick picture of Niall and myself in our ‘new’ kitchen:)
- Don’t overdo the sanding — a light scuff is fine before you start painting. We probably overdid it and tired ourselves out in the process! If your cabinets are already painted, then yes, you will need to sand more thoroughly.
- It is not completely necessary to take the cabinet doors off. If you don’t have too many wall cabinets, leaving them on saves you from having to remove the hinges (which Niall used an electric drill for).
- We used a semi gloss enamel, BEHR brand of paint & primer in one. The darker color only needed two coats and for the top we used three … it will depend what you’re painting over.
- This is a big project — don’t have some other DIY task going on at the same time. And consider small changes first, like swapping out cabinet handles or buying a new faucet (that’s still on our to do list!).
- Be kind and have patience with whoever you’re working with:) Thanks Niall for putting up with my crappy attitude at times!
