Kitchen Cabinets - Done!

We finished painting our kitchen cabinets a couple weeks ago and hung them up last week. They look absolutely amazing! We wanted to brighten up the kitchen, but didn't want the cabinets to be all white since the appliances, counter, floor, and walls are all various shades of white/off-white. A dear friend from Seattle helped me choose the perfect sage green for the bottom cabinets and I couldn't love it more! We opted to spend a little extra on the paint in hopes that it won't chip and will last quite a few years before needing to be touched up. We got Stix primer since the laminate cabinets are super shiny but can't be sanded much because they're cheap particle board underneath. And then for the paint, we used Benjamin Moore Advance, which is designed for cabinets and it looks wonderful! Since we couldn't really do much with the cabinet pulls, we bought new ones (we bought cheap-ish ones, but they were still expensive!). After the expense of the cabinet pulls, we didn't want to spend more to buy new hinges, so my hubby took one of our new cabinet pulls to Home Depot and came home with a can of spray paint that matched the color almost exactly. Just one coat of spray paint and the hinges looked so much better! The project still isn't completely done, we want to paint the pantry doors green also (and we'll put new door knobs on the pantry - the fake gold ones just won't do!) and there is a wall in the kitchen that is still wood paneling, but it looks a million times better already!

And, without further ado, here is the before and after picture!

Painting...

From my last post, you'll know that we've been painting... Kitchen cabinets take a long time to paint... one coat of primer and 3 coats of paint, plus lots of drying time, plus other life things that mean we don't paint every day makes it take even longer...

In addition to painting the cabinets, we're also painting the built-in hutch that's in the dining room. When we came to visit and saw the house, we initially hoped we could remove this hutch. But then we realized that the carpet didn't go under it, so removing it would have been a big hassle. So I started looking for pictures of similar built-ins for ideas of what to do and I stumbled across someone's blog post about remodeling their kitchen from a 1970s mobile home. And, since our place is a 1970s mobile home, I was inspired! They had almost the exact same hutch, and with some paint (and removing the fake-glass doors), it actually looked really nice (here's that post: http://mobilehomeliving.org/1978-double-wide-kitchen-remodel/). So, I knew that I'd be painting our built-in. I just decided to paint it with the same colors as our cabinets, since we already had the paint. What I didn't realize is that the hutch is big. I mean, it doesn't look big, but there are so many corners and surfaces to paint that it's really big. So... I feel like it's taking forever to paint. I think I started 3 weeks ago and I still have at least one more coat to finish up... We're still trying to decide what to do with the huge mirror, so if you have any ideas let me know!

Okay, here's a picture. Since it's not finished, it can't be a before/after picture, so it's a before/during picture :-)

House Projects

Since we moved into our new house, we've been unpacking and also thinking about which house projects we should tackle first. Before we moved in a lot of people from the church graciously spent hours working on the house for us. They painted most of the rooms and cleaned everything up really nicely - what a HUGE blessing!! The house looks completely different than when we saw it two months ago. But there are still a lot of things to do: painting both bathrooms, painting the kitchen cabinets, installing a blind in the dining room, curtains for all the windows, new doors throughout the house, painting the front door, and planting flowers and vegetables in the garden (there are probably more things, that's just everything I can think of right now).

We've decided that our first two projects will be painting the kitchen cabinets - we already started this - and planting some flowers and veggies in the backyard (mostly because if I don't plant them soon, they won't grow this year...). Just for fun, here are two before pictures:

The Kitchen... Who's jealous of those lovely "wood" cabinets?!? haha...

The Backyard... It needs some flowers!