One Year Ago (I Thought I'd Never Be Done Painting)

One year ago, we had just closed on our house and thus started the transformation. Mom came up the day we closed and spent the next week helping with the giant task of painting.

We started in the kitchen because it was the room I disliked the most. Here are some of the best (and yet worst) before pictures.


This was taken during our final walk through, so some of the previous owner's furniture was still there.



The backsplash had this awesome country motif on random tiles.



I think the original owner's may have been vampires. They had black out drapes, blinds and shutters on every window. (I'm only kidding about them being vampires)

The plan was to paint the cabinets white to lighten up the space. Based on the recommendation of one of my co-workers, we used Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations in Pure White. The product comes with a glaze, but we didn't use any because I didn't really want the cabinets to look aged.

So here's the point of my post (really). This was my life for about a week... 

The first thing to go was the country tile backsplash. Mom looks very excited to start the "demo."



Then we took all the doors and drawers to the basement. At this point we also cleaned the inside of the cabinets. Some sticky stuff is still a mystery to this day.



The basement served as a great place for the painting since it was cold outside.

You can get a small glimpse of our retro bar too.

Because we were desperate to see some color and progress, we painted the inside of this cabinet one evening.

Paint, dry, flip, paint, dry. Repeat three times. (UGH)

Here you can see we're getting closer. Porter just crashed in the middle of the floor for days.

And just because I can't forget another happy change during that same time frame...the ceilings were all scraped, re-textured and painted!

Overall, using the Cabinet Transformation product saved us money. BUT it took a long time, three coats (probably because we went from dark oak to white) plus the finish coat, and lots of energy. There were moments I thought we'd never finish.

Here's where the kitchen ended up after that first week of cabinet painting. Stay tuned for the rest of the transformation.

We still had the original countertops, stainless sink I didn't like and no backsplash. But I was so happy and the kitchen finally felt bright and filled with light! You can also see that we replaced the wood in two cabinet doors with seeded glass.

We also painted the walls gray (SW Functional Gray), which you can see best here.



I love a good side by side. Wait till you see the final makeover!

Happy One Year Anniversary to you, dear kitchen!

~Karli