Sunday Kitchen Blogging -- the before pictures

Not much progress on the kitchen front, mostly because my time has been spent so far in decluttering the kitchen -- no small task, as anyone who's ever been to my house can attest.

The first step, to commence tomorrow, will be painting the ceiling. With any luck at all, this will be smooth sailing, and NOT like the last two rooms I painted, in which priming the ceiling resulted in bubbling -- the result of latex paint used a long time ago over oil-based paint. That little adventure resulted in days of scraping sheets of old paint off the ceilings -- not fun.

Ceiling painting is the worst part of the job because it's boring, as well as being overhead. It's made easier by the use of the HomeRight PaintStick, a "seen on TV" product that actually works as advertised. The cleanup is hugely time-consuming, which largely offsets any time you save in actual painting, but the reduction in drips and spatters makes it more than worth it.

Here is what we're dealing with:



Note the hideous, cheap "wood-grain" laminate cabinet doors, and the way the veneers from the LAST reface job 25 years ago are falling off due to dried-out glue. Don't even ask about the wall color; it was my first venture into walls that aren't white, and I wanted green. I still like green, so I'm experimenting, as you can see:



The "work area" of the kitchen, which is 9'6" wide by 17' long, will have along the soffit the Arts & Crafts wall border shown in the photo. This will also set off nicely the light oak cabinet doors, which you can see here (design 200). I bought all these supplies two years ago, so of course dark cabinets are now coming back into style. But I like the warm look of oak, so oak it is. The buff color in the photos is what the rest of the walls will be. It's not easy to get an arts & crafts look in a 1950's cape, but I'm going to do my damnedest. Ideally we'll get to a passing resemblance to this or this.

Of course none of this addresses the hideous yellow countertop yet, or the even worse vinyl floor (which I will show you for your taunting pleasure tomorrow), but one step at a time.

So what makes me think I can do a better job with cabinet refacing than the so-called "professionals" who did this last time?

Well, aside from personal investment in the workmanship, I have this book, along with the tools cited therein, which purport to make the job easier. And I had the good people at Kitchen Doors Online to help me over the phone with planning and measuring.

So over the next few weeks or months, interspersed with the political rants, you'll get to see if I can actually do this.