The Power of Paint {Kitchen Facelift}

Usually when people get facelifts it is to make them look better.  More fresh or younger looking.  When we moved into our house our kitchen looked liked she was about 40 years old.  So we needed to give her a facelift so she could feel more like a 25 year old.  She fought it along the way but in the end I'm pretty sure she's happy.  Confident...pretty...think Marilyn Monroe standing on the air vent confident!

Too much?!?

Moving on then...

There are only a few more rooms left in our house to show you.  Today I'm showing you our kitchen and the changes we made to update it. 

I only have these two before pictures.  These cabinets are just your basic builder grade cabinets.  There isn't really anything special to them.  We were lucky that the first owners of this house added the crown moulding to the top.  So at least we had that to work with. 

The first time we tackled this project we were just starting out as DIYers so we were not exactly sure what we were doing.  Matt took off all the doors and lightly sanded them down.  He then primed and painted them with latex paint. 

We picked out a milk chocolate brown color for the cabinets.  When we were done painting I thought I was in love.  I had always loved the look of brown cabinets.  And in some cases I still do.  So this is how the cabinets stayed for about 6 years.

 

You can see in the picture above that we hadn't even painted behind the oven yet.  Over the years the paint around the knobs started to chip off.  There were nicks from the boys climbing on the cabinets and running into them with cars.

This year when we decided to put this house on the market I knew these cabinets would need a paint job.  Plus, my taste had changed and I was over my brown cabinet phase.  These pictures make me cringe.  Eeeewwwweeee!

This time around instead of sanding I used oil based primer.  I painted these cabinets back in February and there isn't a single nick around the knobs.  So oil based primer holds up much better.

And here is our kitchen today.

We have changed so many things in this kitchen.  This is another spot in the house that took me forever to realize what I really liked. 

Here is a list of changes:
Painted cabinets (Fieldstone by Benjamin Moore, island color is Black Beauty by Benjamin Moore)
Installed new floor tile
Updated all appliances to black
New sink
New faucet
Added floating shelves
Decrapified the kitchen counters.  Did you see all the crap I used to have on there?  What tha?

And that's it folks!  100 meeeellion times better don't ya think?


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Beneath My Heart