Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets Month

It’s true: May really was paint your kitchen cabinets month.  I hope you all got on that and are enjoying your “brand new” kitchens.

After several weeks of my girls asking when I was going to paint the cabinets, I finally got on that – with a little help from my new (and totally awesome!) paint sprayer!  I must admit, I was a little trepidatious about using, but my friend brought over a bunch of shelves and chairs that we could practice on and it was pretty darned amazing.  If you’re careful and put on fairly light coats, you get a fantastic finish – in way less time!

You may remember that the kitchen used to look like this:

It actually looks pretty good in this picture, but the cabinets were showing a bit of wear and I’m just a whiter cabinet kind-of girl, so I knew from before we moved in that painting them was going to be a high-priority project.

I nearly killed myself, pulling a couple of all-day paint sessions and got it done in just over a week and here’s what it looks like now:

I went back and forth on whether to use brushed nickel or oil-rubbed bronze pulls and knobs, but I’m SO glad I went with the ORB.  They’re dark to tie in with the counters and little bit of bronze you see on them works well with the gold flecks in the granite.

I’m also really pleased with the decision to leave the doors of those upper cabinets.  If you look carefully, you can see that those upper cabinets don’t actually line up with the cabinets below them.  We discussed not putting knobs on the upper doors to make it a little less obvious, but leaving them open for display is even better.  They were already pretty much unusable, so why not put something pretty up there?!

This is the view I used to see from my front door:

And here it is now, so much brighter (if a little blown out…):

Here, this is a bit better:

People have commented that it seems bigger now and I have to agree.  It also feels much more like home to me.

I happened to be looking back at my ToDo list for the kitchen and was pleased with how much I’ve actually accomplished:

• Paint the cabinets white!
• Change out knobs and pulls
• Paint the walls
• Cut missing shelf for one lower cabinet, so we can actually use it!
• Build pull out drawers for cabinets
• Get rid of the angled corners in the doorway
• Beef up trim around doorways
• Refinish wood floors in a darker color (actually, we’ve decided it’s easier and less expensive to just replace it all with new pre-finished flooring)

Not too shabby!  The floors are quickly moving up the list, since all of the flooring downstairs is in really sorry shape.  Just need to win the lottery and get myself psyched up to actually do the install myself.  Until then, I’ll just enjoy my new brighter kitchen.