The Kitchen, Part II

Subtitled: Things Fall Apart

As I mentioned in Part I, Andrew and I stayed up into the wee hours of the night painting the first coat onto the cabinets. I decided on a grayish green. I tried to get as close to the color in the aforementioned dream kitchen as I could... but it ended up a little more on the gray side and less on the green than I imagined, but I still really loved the outcome.

Andrew was so wise to lay out the cabinet doors in an exact order of where they came off. I was not so wise, and sleepy-eyed and disoriented the next morning and somehow, for some reason, started moving them around to paint the second coat on.

This is when things started to fall apart. These were custom built cabinets that need to go in their home... there are so many of them and so many different combination possibilities, that most of our cabinets still look like this

Pardon the yellow tones, our camera flash is broken right now

 Do you see how one cabinet lays on the other? That's the case with about 4 of them right now. We think it may also have to do with the new hinges we got, but even when we changed them back they still don't close just right. We did get new hardware which I think updates the kitchen a lot. (It better, for the price! I couldn't believe how much a little knob costs.)

That was Thing #1.

Thing #2 is worse. The paint is peeling. Yes, we did check to see what the base of the paint was on the cabinets before we started painting. We were told to rub the cabinets with a cloth with alcohol. If the paint comes off on the cloth it is latex (water based). The paint did not come off, so we assumed oil based. Either we got it wrong, or Lowe's gave us latex paint... but something is not right. And I don't think it's right that we are going to have to sand all these cabinets down and paint them. Again.

So friends, this is real life. I never, ever want to flip a house.

I still have some more to tell you about other renovations... tune in later for counter tops and back splash!  At this rate, the kitchen might be a six month renovation.

The Kitchen, Part I

In case you're new to our family, we just moved ourselves down to Mississippi. We bought a house built in the 1940s that we really, really love. It's been kept up pretty well but there are things about it that we have changed or are desperately wanting to change. I knew the first thing I'd want to do something about was the kitchen:

 Things I love about it:

 1. Beautiful hardwood floors

 2. Spacious, lots of counter space

 3. Windows above the sink that look out onto things that are GREEN (we lived within centimeters of   our neighbors before this)

Things I am not so crazy about:

1. Striped wall paper

2. Gold hardware

3. Navy blue Formica counter tops

4. The overall scream of "I'm from the 80s and lovin' it!" 

For about 4 years now, I've been head over heels in love with a certain kitchen that I saw in the now out of print Cottage Living. As soon as I saw it, I knew that it was my dream kitchen and someday I was going to renovate a kitchen to look just like it. Hold your breath, because here it is!

Isn't it lovely and cozy and modern all at the same time?

So, being the insane people we are... we started to renovate this kitchen the day after we moved in. No, I'm not kidding. I am an instant gratification sort of person. The first thing we did was remove all.the.wallpaper. Andrew's sweet, sweet parents were there for this incredibly long job. I'm telling you these people must have super glued the paper to the wall. We found some helpful tips in removing wall paper:

1. Use a score over the wallpaper

2. Spray liberally with a wallpaper removal spray AND let set for 15 minutes (I hear you can also use a fabric softener)

3. Use a scraper and/or fingers....

4. Pray. And turn on some music to take your mind off of what you're doing.

You can see Andrew's dad in the picture below finishing up the last corner. This was probably around 10:30 pm that night... we had been doing this all day. Andrew is starting to take off the cabinets because we were also going to paint the cabinets that night, which I will tell you about soon in Part II! And just to give you a little cliff-hanger... it goes all wrong.