Kitchen Cabinet Makeover!

Our kitchen was the only room of the house (besides the sun porch) that we hadn't really updated after moving into our house three years ago. My mindset was to just put up with the kitchen until we would move someday to another house with a (hopefully) bigger and better kitchen. Because it wasn't exactly our favorite room, we didn't take any pictures besides the few from our "walk-through" before we offered on the house! So sadly, we don't have great "before" pictures, but I think you'll get the idea. Let me just describe as you look at the pictures below. You will notice: outdated orange-ish/red-ish cabinets with old hardware, no overhead lighting, an old and tiny fridge, faded striped wallpaper, fake butcher-block counter tops, and yes, carpet. Dark and dirty kitchen carpet. Consider what happens when you accidentally drop an egg on the floor. Yuck. We considered ripping up the carpet, but underneath found an even more hideous laminate floor I couldn't stand to look at. So, we are keeping the carpet until we redo the floors, hopefully this summer. This part of our kitchen makeover is focused on the cabinets, however.

Before we bought the house... (and our realtor, Todd :)

   
 We had heard about how horrific it was to sand and paint kitchen cabinets, so we never planned on doing it. Recently, however, we found a kit called Cabinet Transformations by Rust-oleum. It claimed that you did not need to sand your cabinets, but only de-gloss them with a product they included in the kit before painting. Since it was a pretty affordable kit, we decided to go for it. We also figured our kitchen couldn't really get much worse.

With the gracious help of Dan's parents, it took us a total of about 30 work hours plus drying time in between the coats, over the course of about 6 days. While there were a couple of frustrating things about the kit (1. The deglosser did not work as well as stated, so we had to lightly sand everything before deglossing 2. We needed four coats of paint instead of the instructed two, and 3. the clear top coat dried yellow-ish if used slightly too much.), but overall we are very happy with the results and the price. To completely refinish the cabinets and replace all the hardware (hinges, knobs, & handles) it cost us less than $200! The worst part by far was replacing the hardware and hanging the doors. Thankfully my parents helped us with that horrid part!

And now for the AFTER pictures...
  

 

We used Rust-oleum's Cabinet Transformations in Pure White, without the decorative glaze.

Next we are planning on using Rust-oleum's Countertop Transformations to refinish our counter-tops! We'll let you know how that goes...