Happy Monday! As promised, here are the pics of the finished kitchen (read about some of the prep work here and here). I tried to include as many “before” pictures as could find, so you can all mourn (or rejoice, if you’re like me) the loss of the blue walls.
Eat-in kitchen area, before (love the random off-center wine painting and the two wine decanters, don’t you? I wonder what that says about us…?):
And after (I need some cool art idea to cover the awkward outlet on the back wall…thoughts??):
Stove/oven area, before (and our old dining room before we built our dining room table, buffet, and liquor cabinet, and painted it gray):
And the same area after:
The fridge area (minus a before picture…sorry!):
And the sink area, before (sorry, just realized I don’t have a good picture of this wall either):
Sink area, after:
So now that you’ve seen the before/after, there are a few more details I thought I would share on how we finished this project. First, you may notice in the “before” pictures above that the walls behind the sink and stove are covered in tile. Not in a nice backsplash way…more in a “why are there SO many tiles on this wall” way. In an effort to make the disappear, I painted them the same color as the walls (Benjamin Moore Gray Owl). We debated painting them white to match the cabinets instead, but that would have left virtually no wall in the kitchen to actually paint gray. Short of knocking them all out, I don’t know what else to do with them. Guess I’ll never have a pretty tile backsplash…sad day.
Besides that, one of the easiest things we did to improve the looks of our kitchen was to caulk all the gaps around our cabinets. Living in a house that was built in the 1920s means that you have very few, if any, right angles or even walls, which left mannnnnnny areas that looked like this:
Not that annoying, until you see how much better it looks after a simple bead of caulk:
Huge difference, right? We did this around almost all the cabinet boxes, as well as along the floor to give everything a polished look:
Also, you may have noticed that we changed all our kitchen hardware. As I mentioned last week, whoever gave our cabinets the brown glaze finish also gave the same treatment to all the hinges (thanks again for that, whoever you are). Since we had to replace the hinges no matter what, we wanted to get new handles and drawer pulls to match. You can see them in all the “after” pictures above, but in case you’re wondering, here are the brands and styles we bought at Lowes:
Buying these was definitely the most expensive part of this project….we probably spent a good $200 on all the hardware, but I think it makes a huge difference!
Speaking of budget, here’s an approximation of what this project cost in total:
Paint and Primer: $125 (with plenty of primer and white cabinet paint leftover, although this number would have been higher if I hadn’t gotten the 2nd gallon of Gray Owl for free…gotta love a Benjamin Moore guarantee!)
Hardware: $200
Various Supplies (tape, brushes, caulk, drop cloth, etc): $50
Total: $375
Not bad, eh? I need to spend a little time decorating it, but it’s basically finished and I’d love to know what you think! Meanwhile, we’ll be super busy working on the biggest project we’ve taken on so far. Yeah…its big. Huge. Amazing. You’ll see.
xox,
katie
