Renovations Underway - The Kitchen

SO, we started with the kitchen. Most people would say that that's pretty ambitious... I can tell you that it is. As of today we're not nearly finished with it. Our goals in doing these projects are to never take out any loans as the interest just puts us further behind on our amount invested. So, little by little and paycheck by paycheck, the transformation commences.


















As you can see, the kitchen started out looking bleak to say the least. The cabinets are custom built for this specific kitchen, so I certainly didn't want to loose them. Initially, I thought that I would just sand and paint the framework and re-face them and it would solve all of my problems. So, off we went to the Home Depot, or as we like to call it these days, Home. And we bought all of our needed tools; an electrical sander, a cordless drill, a circular saw and more sandpaper than you can shake a stick at. Then off we went...


I should mention that we started this project with no concrete goals in sight. Ryan has a very modern, straight-edge kind of style... think B&B Italia meets black concrete floors... yeah. I'm more of a contemporary cottage style. I like white linens, silver accents, dark and weathered woods, painted woods and very muted colors.

So, When the sanding was through, my fiance thought that it would be a good idea to open up a three-door cabinet on the left of the sink. I think it turned out to be a brilliant idea.




So, we were torn on what to do with the cabinets... Ryan at one point said he was going to tear them all out and go get new ones put in. That would have been way more expensive than we had budgeted for, so I talked him back from the ledge and we continued. I still had this wonderful vision of my sister Angie's (you'll hear about her a lot) house in Los Feliz (a suburb of Los Angeles). She had a fantastically talented painter who painted all of her kitchen cabinets an antique white and it made the kitchen so serene and lovely. Now, I don't have nearly the same size kitchen. She had enough room to put a sofa, a full size dining table and a dresser to house the television equipment in hers; so, serenity per-se does not have to be my end goal here. The crisp, clean look however, is something I had to find a way to capture. So, we threw caution to the wind and painted the cabinets, doors and all an oil-based antique white. Although I do LOVE the simplicity of latex paint on ceilings and walls, cabinets and casegoods I feel should always be done in an oil. Oil retains a shiny luster that latex simply does not have. It doesn't keep fingerprints and it self levels as it is applied. It is a pain to work with, for sure... but well worth it. So, I went back to the Depot and found some very modern, cylinder shaped handles that were 4 for $20, (a pretty good price) and we applied them.


Now the question was the paint color. I chose a muted cocoa with red tones, but Ryan wanted to go more bold. We had already decided to go with red as the accent color in the kitchen due to the begining of a red Le Creuset pot collection Angie started for me; not to mention it's Ryan's favorite color. So, after some deliberation Ryan had the idea to go with a blue to off-set the red. We looked at a couple we liked, and decided on Russian ice by Behr. We are only using Behr on the whole house because their color selections and quality fit our styles perfectly.

We brought the paint home and started it yesterday morning. By last night the kitchen was a whole new room. We haven't yet tackled the new appliances or the countertop or floors, but the cabinets are change enough for this week.