After weeks of work, a lot of frustration, and many buckets of paint, the kitchen cabinets are finished! We took them from this splotchy, dark stain:

to this:

And from this:

to this:

Light and bright and a thousand times better, so we’re done, right? Well, not if you look around a bit. The wall where we removed a cabinet to add shelves still looks like this:

Although yesterday I did tape the joints and add the first layer of drywall paste. The cabinets look great, and it’s way better, but it still has a ways to go. We’re waiting on the wood shelves that will go up here, and in the meantime I can finish doing the drywall finishing, priming, and painting that this wall needs. It’s hard because I feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing with the drywall (despite reading tons of tutorials), but I’m figuring it out (I think!).

And then there’s this:

I’ve been painting the breakfast nook walls and wood window frames, too. Apparently I just can’t get enough of painting. A really good time to paint is when you don’t care at all how much paint you drip on the floor, though. It’s really freeing, and saves lots of time. Why don’t I care about the floor? Because next week we’re having professionals come in to strip off the layers of old flooring (vinyl on top, plus possibly linoleum underneath that), and refinish the old floorboards underneath. Which means that our nice, shiny new kitchen will be mostly unusable for a week, and we have to take the refrigerator and range out of the room entirely. Yikes. But hopefully it’ll be worth it! I can’t wait to see how it turns out.

Sources:

Everything is painted with Benjamin Moore semi-gloss in Cotton Balls, but we used the Advance paint for the cabinets, and regular Regal paint for the walls.

For hardware, we used the Peg knobs and the Vernon bin pulls, both from Rejuvenation, and a Mid-century bar pull from House of Antique Hardware for the tip-out tray in front of the sink.