Progress: The Beginnings [The Kitchen]

The tale of our kitchen cabinets is a sad one. I am partial to white cabinets and was elated to see that they had already been painted white, but was quickly brought back down to earth when I saw the condition they were in. But they needed to be primed anyway to rid them of the house stink.

With great care I removed every cabinet door from the kitchen.

Can you guess why I insisted on getting new hardware? This is also a good depiction of what the electrical outlets looked like...

I spent DAYS lovingly (hand) sanding, priming and painting each one of those cabinets, only to have them look not unlike they did they day we bought the house. They smelled better though, so that was a win.

They don't look so bad in these pictures, but the few years that have passed since I redid them have not been kind. They need to be sanded again with an electric sander, and then sprayed with paint and sealed with something. This is a project we might take on sometime in the winter. We also have to paint all of the (new) doors we bought for the house but lord knows when that all is going to happen.

Are you ready for another heartbreak? This is the glass tile saga...

Because our kitchen counters are 80s wood patterned formica (you know, I actually don't hate them and I'm not ashamed to say that) we had a hard time finding a tile that would look alright with it. When I stumbled upon this beautiful shimmery brown glass tile from Home Depot I knew that was precisely what I wanted in our house. It was a splurge for us, but I wanted it badly.

Nate gave me a quick briefing on how you're supposed to apply tile and I thought I had it down. I used mortar on the walls and lined up the tile to the best of my ability. I though that I had to leave spaces around the outlets for the switchplates, and that resulted in some awkward gaps that I ended up not being able to put switchplates in. So that was mistake 1 and mistake 2 was even worse. The mortar I used was a little too heavy duty for a kitchen glass tile backsplash and as it dried the glass tile shifted! (Did I mention it never lined up properly near the stove anyway.) The result looked ok from far but was FAR from ok.

  

Pictures don't do it justice at all, but it was a hot mess. It also ended up not going up far enough to meet the new range we put in.

The glass tile haunted me for a few years until last weekened when we had to literally cut the drywall out to install a new (gorgeous) subway tile backsplash. I will post pictures of that soon.

 

Oh and just for funsies this is what our kitchen sink looked like. You can bet that I did one hell of a happy dance when we put in a brand new stainless steel one!