Let me give you some reminders of the state of our kitchen. We started off with green walls and oak cabinets.
The previous owners must have been ultra destructive. If you take a look at the pictures above, the darker green areas on the walls were huge bumps as if there were all these holes in the walls at one point and they "fixed" it by slapping some mud over them and painting without sanding it down to be flush with the rest of the wall. And the walls were like this in just about every room of the house. I didn't want to texture the walls, so they have been a pain to get all smoothed out. I almost wish they would have just left the holes because it would have been easier to just patch them up rather than to fix their patch job. But oh well, such is life.
After we got the walls all smoothed out, I started getting them primed when one Friday night we decided we would just knock out the soffit above the cabinets. Little did we know we were opening a can of worms. We were under the impression that we could just cut away the drywall and be done. However, it was a bit more involved than we anticipated and we ended up needing to take the cabinets off the walls to finish it up. Once the soffit was down we had some big holes that we patched up with drywall and mud. Our ceiling is textured so we mixed up some mud and sand and slathered it on to match, I still need to paint the ceiling which is a task that I may or may not be avoiding. We also added some wiring to install lights underneath the cabinets which is what you see hanging in the third photo below.
We figured as long as we had cabinets off the walls it would be a good time to update them! As you all know I couldn't decide between staining them darker and painting them white, and I thank you all again for all your input and suggestions! White was the right choice for sure! The first thing I did was to sand them all down. Here's a really attractive photo of me sanding.
Then we filled in all the holes where the knobs were, and sanded down some more so our fillings were flush with he rest of the wood. I think that's what I was sanding in the photo above; after sanding a little I would close my eyes and run my hand over the area to see if it was still raised at all and if I needed to sand some more (or if I had sanded too much.) The stuff we used to fill in the holes smelled REALLY strong and since I was nice and preggo Brandon and my little brother Timmy filled in all those holes for me so I wouldn't have to breathe it in. Look at them so hard at work.
Brandon's good friend Alex was kind enough to spray them white for us which I appreciated very much! If you want to paint your cabinets yourself and don't have an awesome friend who can spray them for you then I recommend reading this post by Virginia; she's my favorite and I was planning on following her tutorial before Alex offered to help us paint them. We painted all the cabinets that we took off the walls at his shop and hung them back up. A short time later we got the bottom cabinets painted as well, but I had a nice modge podge of a kitchen for a minute there.
Some time in the middle of all this I painted all the kitchen walls in Valspar Filtered Shade. It's a nice grey with some blue undertones and I love it! We also added some crown molding along the top of the cabinets to make it look complete.
For new hardware I went to Lowe's and picked out satin nickel knobs for the cupboard doors, and arched pulls for the drawers. One day I'll hang some pretty things on my walls, get those lights beneath the cabinets, and put the covers back on my outlets; but for now I'm pretty pleased with my new kitchen.
