Kitchen Makeover has Begun!

Kitchen on move-in day

One of the worst rooms in our house was the kitchen. Eventually, if we do purchase the house a complete rip-out of everything and all will occur, but for now, I want to make the room look better. Right now, it's downright hideous.

Built-in cabinets

The previous tenants seem to have wanted to do the same, but either ran out of patience, skill or money along the way. The insert part of several doors and the built-in cabinets were painted with navy/black chalk paint and the hinges were spray painted dark navy.  They did a REALLY bad job with this, letting the paint run and it looked horrible. They also started to paint the counters with a Rustoleum product to re-do counters. Granted painting counters IS a way to save money when you are doing a small makeover, but you have to do it right. Not only did they not really do it correctly, they gave up halfway through the project, so we had half blue and half tan counters. The flooring is very old and ugly vinyl tiles and the cabinets are dark brown 70's style cheap ones with outdated hardware. Oh, and the appliances are beige and old, probably 80's or earlier.

Basement door with a HORRIBLE paint job

So I wanted to do something to make this space a little more pleasant. We replaced the dishwasher last summer when the other one wasn't quite getting the dishes clean. We also added a garbage disposal. Jay attempted some painting of the built-in cabinets, but had only got most of the ugly chalk paint covered. I got permission recently from the owners to paint all of the cabinets white. So I dove into that project last week. There are 3 doors, not including the back door, that needed painting and a set of built-in cabinets, all with what seems to be original hardware. The hardware has been painted over many, many times. I started by removing doors from the cabinets and then removing the hardware from the cabinet doors. I spent a significant amount of time on this project, trying not to strip the screws. I've been laboriously cleaning the old paint off this hardware. Turned out that it was mostly brass-plated and has tarnished and corroded pretty badly, but some of the pieces are better than others. I really want to keep the old hardware, so I did some research and found that a metallic paint (not spray) and an acrylic clear coat could work to bring the hardware back to life and hold up fairly well. So, I'm slowly getting this done and starting to paint some of the cabinets. More pictures to come of the progress as it is made!