Kitchen Remodel – Part 1

A few years ago, I got into an ‘update mode’ for our house. I was looking around our house one day and realized that it didn’t feel like ‘us’. Yes, we were the ones who picked the furniture and did the painting, but we had been in the house for several years and we had changed, not just personally, but our family had and what we needed/wanted.

The year before our kitchen remodel I started updating our bedrooms. My husband’s hobby room got a fresh coat of paint and I cleaned his carpet (his carpet was newer and still in good condition). Little did I know that that was going to be the easiest room in the entire house!

My craft room got a fresh coat of paint and new flooring. My daughters room got a fresh coat of paint, new flooring, and I built her a loft bed from an Ana White plan. And our bedroom had the biggest update: new paint, new carpet, I built in bookcases flanking a window and made a heavy duty lift top bed made from 2×8’s. It was a lot of work, but we now have an amazing amount of storage for extra blankets and out of season clothing.

The next year dawned, and it was time to tackle the kitchen!

Here is our before:

I will say right now that this would fall into a “budget remodel” category. I don’t remember exactly what we spent – I would like to say $1000-$1500 – but I am not sure. It was definitely a lot less than if we would have ripped it out and put a new one in. I also did most the work myself and my husband helped out when he could. Our other bonus was that our appliances were in good condition, so we didn’t have to buy any replacements.

So, what to do first?!?

First: clean everything out of the kitchen! Before we started, I made meals plans out. We had a lot of sandwiches (not just from Subway!). And we ate off paper plates – because I wasn’t cleaning dishes if I didn’t need to!

We ended up moving the fridge to the other side of the room, which would allow the 3-foot-wide space it was in to be converted to a cabinet and more counterspace. In the space beside the fridge, I built a bookshelf to hold miscellaneous kitchen stuff (cereal, cookbooks, etc.).

Then it was time to take the cabinet doors off and drawers out. Since I was planning on painting the cabinets again, I needed to remove the paint. I used Citristrip to remove the paint. Ugh, it was a mess, but it worked well.

The doors and drawers were flat, and I wanted a more of a shaker cabinet look in them. So, after doing some looking on Pinterest and thinking about it, I came up with an idea to use lath strips to give the flat surface the raised detail I was after.

It was actually pretty easy. I took measurements of each front and then after cutting the pieces to size, I glued and nailed them to the fronts. Once all were done, I used a little wood putty in the cracks and then each piece got a good sanding, wiped down and 3 coats of paint.

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Whew, that’s a lot, and there is still a lot more. Check back here for the rest of our kitchen remodel!

–Dawn