Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Kitchen - part 2

What I failed to mention at the end of the last post is that, when we decided to not renovate the whole kitchen, my hubby agreed to getting a new dishwasher.  Ours still technically worked, but it was icky-looking on the inside and it gave me the heeby-jeebies to think about washing baby bottles in it.  So at the end of my peaceful sleeping week, we were in Lowe's starting the dishwasher investigation, and Isaac stumbles across some clearance cabinets.  Can't say I ever even knew they sold pre-made cabinets at home improvement stores.  Next thing I knew, these puppies were sitting in our kitchen:
At $4 each, they had our "renovation" plans started back up, and at a whole different level.  Wow.  So much for sleeping well!  Had to bring the "design team" back in, evaluate whether it would look tacky to add new cabinets on top of our existing ones, how we'd get them to match (i.e. whether we felt comfortable painting them or not), and determine whether neighbor/cabinet guy would be interested in the project and at what price.  In addition to the significant savings on cabinetry, another benefit to this option is that we would not be forced to replace the countertop at the same time.  We could split the cost by doing the countertop in a few months/years/decades.  We eventually decided to move forward, and by mid-April, our kitchen looked like this:
We saved so much that we were even able to add fun features like the shelves to the left of the sink, and the roll-out shelves to the right of the fridge!  Now... how to make them look like one unit, rather than a hodge-podge of miscellany?

Mom and I were in a paint store preparing to paint nursery furniture (post forth-coming), and "happened" to overhear a lady ordering paint for her kitchen cabinets.  Always on the ball, my Mom starting asking her questions, and turns out she was an interior designer and had a cabinet painter that she regularly recommended to her clients, who was also getting ready to have him paint her own cabinets!  Wow.  Again.  We snagged his number and called him on the way back home.

His price was very reasonable, and after painting (or assisting with) the nursery furniture, I was ready to never see another paint brush again, so we signed him up.  We had picked a paint color back in phase 1, so that was easy-peasy at this point.  Just a few days later, our kitchen looked like this:
Crazy!  We went out of town for the weekend to avoid the fumes from oil-based paint, and then came back to hang the doors.  By Easter, we had this:
And just in case you forgot where we started:
Beautiful.  Lovely.  Wonderfully spacious and practical.  Fresh and clean.  Not orangey.  Oh, so many ways to describe our "new" kitchen.  (P.S.  Did you note the new dishwasher from picture 3 to 4?  My hubby still let me follow through on that one.  We haven't done a great job of capturing photos of that, but maybe one of these days.)  Essentially, I was in love, content, and not broke.  And there was even time to spare before Baby's arrival!  Life was good.

Going green (really)... Soli Deo Gloria.