DIY Series: Kitchen Makeover - Cabinets

We have been in our house for almost three years. I wanted to start this series of posts on the projects we have done to make the place our own.

One of the biggest projects we've done was for the kitchen. I thought we would kick the series off with the kitchen makeover.

The house was a bank owned foreclosure in fairly good condition. We were missing the fridge in the kitchen, but the rest of the kitchen was presentable. We did not like the maple color of the cabinets, but did not want to waste money to replace those perfectly fine cabinets. New cabinets means $$$. After days of researching on Google and browsing through many pictures of DIY kitchen projects blogs, we reached the decision of painting our cabinets to get the new look we wanted. 

Painting in Session
Picking the right color was difficult. After many trips to paint stores and many sample paints later, I finally made up my mind on the chocolate brown color. Before the paint could actually be applied, cleaning and priming needed to take place. Cleaning took a fairly long time. It took a few nights to finally finish cleaning all the doors and frames. Then we took down all the doors, taped and started priming. We primed, and then wait for them to dry overnight. Finally we reached the painting stage. We painted, waited for them to dry, sanded, painted and repeated. It was a very lengthy project that we did not expect to take so long. When it was finally done, Mr Y said he would never paint ever again. The kitchen had a completely new look after all the doors were hung back up.

The original cabinets did not have any hardware on them meaning it was hard to pull open the drawers and doors. We wanted a contemporary/modern look, but found certain pulls too expensive, more than $2 each. We made many trips to hardware stores, and brought home many pulls to try on the cabinets. We found some cheaper ones (the price dropped after our purchase, but we were able to request a price adjustment at the store afterwards). As the cabinets are fairly dark colored, the satin nickel on the pulls brightened up the space a little. 

The kitchen looked much nicer after the cabinets were painted in a different color. Instead of spending thousands, a bucket of paint and two paint brushes transformed all the cabinets. Here is what we spent on the entire project:

Paint              $50
Paint brushes  $10
Primer            $20
Sand Paper     $2
Pulls               $44
----------------------
Total              $126

And of course many, many hours of labor after work. Getting a better looking kitchen: PRICELESS.


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