The kitchen cabinets are finished!!!!! I’m am so excited to show them to you! I thought it would be fun to dig up pics of how the kitchen looked when we moved in our house 5 1/2 years ago so you could see just how far it has come. There are a million tutorials on painting kitchen cabinets, so I’m not going to tell you how to do that. I sanded, primed and painted…6 COATS OF PAINT! Going from black to white cabinets will take you 3 coats of primer and 3 coats of paint. Trust me on this one! The white I used is "Antique White" by Glidden. Onto the pics.
Here is our lovely kitchen the way it looked when we moved in. (These are the pics from the MLS listing.) Shiny, paneled walls. Peaches and cream cabinets. Linoleum floor. Chili peppers hanging from the windows. No dishwasher. It was a jewel.
And here is how the kitchen looked before I painted the upper cabinets white. We moved the peninsula against the wall and added upper cabinets. All the cabinet doors and drawer fronts were replaced. We added a dishwasher and new appliances. I obviously painted the cabinets black. We installed hardwood floors and granite countertops. We painted the gleaming paneling a pale, minty green. My chosen colors were black, pink and green.
Here they are all finished! I really love the contrast of the black and white. It’s amazing how much the white paint has brightened up the kitchen. I hardly need to turn on the lights at night anymore because they just glow.
There’s always a sweet pug peeking in while I take pictures. My counters are never this clean, but the bright, white cabinets have inspired me to keep the counters as uncluttered as possible.
Here’s the main view of the kitchen! See how gleaming it is?! And don’t you love the “artwork” on the fridge? Priceless. I wasn’t about to remove it for pics. Keeping it real, people.
We all love a good before/after, so here it is!
BEFORE
AFTER
Six coats of paint and a week and a half of hard work was totally worth it! Don’t be scared to go for it.
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Long story super short: we had to do some repair work in our basement because of a cracked cast iron pipe. The result of that work landed me priming some new paneling on Monday. Since I finished priming the paneling in record time and didn’t want to waste any of my primer, I decided I should just go ahead and start priming my kitchen cabinets! I’ve had the paint for months and just haven’t found the right time to start painting. Of course, I figured the right time should be the week that school starts back and I start teaching again. Perfect timing.
I did get a whole lot done though! On Monday, I removed all the upper cabinet doors and primed all the cabinet boxes. The rest of the work will take some time. The cabinet doors are in pretty bad shape. Whoever painted those doors five years ago did not know what they were doing! (That might have been me.) I’m going to have to do some major sanding and cleaning before I can prime and paint. In the meantime, this is what we’ll be looking at:
I’m using Kilz Clean Start primer, and it is fabulous! Definitely the best that I’ve worked with so far. These are the cabinets we use as our “pantry” since we don’t have a walk-in pantry. The majority of the cabinets are on the other side of the kitchen. I’m only painting the upper cabinets to lighten the kitchen a bit. I still love my black cabinets and don’t want to lose them completely! Plus, those lower cabinets get SUPER dirty from a certain two year old and two dogs, so the thought of white cabinets down there actually scares me a bit.
I had my external hard drive out because I was making our yearly photo book and ran across this picture from five years ago. These are the same cabinets. The uppers were new and not painted (doors not yet installed) and the lowers were a lovely peach and cream. The paneling was a super high gloss, and we had vented doors EVERYWHERE (even the bathroom!)! Thank goodness I could see past all this when we bought our house! Prior to the hardwoods, there was a lovely linoleum that the pattern actually looked like there were footprints in it.
It. was. so. bad.
Looking back through all the pictures from when we first bought our house over five years ago has made me so proud of how much we have done! I’ll show you more “before” pics when I’m done painting the cabinets so you’ll really appreciate the transformation. The former owners, in addition to all the lovely treatments above, had plastic chili peppers hanging from the kitchen windows!
Happy Wednesday!
