Home Improvement – Kitchen Makeover

Adam DIY, My Life

I had New Years off and Caitlin had that and Friday to relax at home, so of course I decided we needed to spend all our waking hours on a DIY home improvement project. When we first bought this house, the bulk of the downstairs was an unpleasant terracotta color (one hallway was a light green that matched nothing) and the kitchen was red.

Last Thanksgiving we decided to paint the downstairs and spent 5 days at home painting every wall light grey (revere pewter by Benjamin Moore). We also did an accent wall and the lower half of a wall below the chair rail dark gray (can’t recall the color right now). However we never made it to the cabinets before it was back to work days and weekends. Finally a year later, we found 4 days we could string together, so instead of relaxing I enlisted the troops and we worked our asses off. I always grossly underestimate the time it takes to complete a project like this. This is either a weakness or my greatest strength, because it makes me dumb enough to start this stuff.

A lot of people liked the red and we didn’t mind it, but I really had a paint theme of gray and white in mind, and I’ve come across a lot of photos of black granite and white cabinets on Pinterest and Houzz and thought they looked really good.

To start the project we took off all the knobs and handles then removed all the doors. I then used my new Makita Sander on all the surfaces to roughen them up. After that we put on a coat of primer, let that dry, and then followed up with 2 coats of white. I learned an important lesson about painting anything 2 sided. It’s going to take forever because everything has to happen twice. Our 3 coats turned in to 6 dry times of roughly 4 hours each.

Finally we reinstalled the doors, put the hardware back on, removed the painters tape and did final touch up and clean up. I think the project turned out beautifully and I’m really happy with the white. Hopefully they’re not too difficult to keep clean.

I’m also pretty pleased with how much money we saved. I had a friend tell me that he spend $2,000 recently having his kitchen painted. We managed to complete everything in 4 days at a cost of a $100 or so in primer, paint, and tape, saving $1,900 to go toward other things. It also leaves me with more knowledge than I had before and a deeper appreciation for my kitchen.

What do you think? Do you like the white? Have you done any kitchen remodels yourself? If you have any thoughts please leave them in the comments.

Before

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