Viola! Kitchen Face Lift

I had this idea that I would first blog about all of the steps in updating our kitchen, and then do a post with the final reveal, but it ended up being really hard to find pictures that show what I did but don't show how the kitchen looks now. So I'm going to show how it ended up, and then post about how we did things in little tutorial type posts later. Sound good? Cool! I'm super happy with how it all came together. And we did it without any big monetary layout, mostly just a TON of painting. I love painting...

Do you remember the big, bad before? With grosstastic laminate flooring, severely outdated cabinets with yucky hardware, wallpaper from the 80's, and tile counter tops with dark brown grout? Here's a reminder:

 Let's pause a moment to take it all in.

We decided to go for a fun, bright look since we needed to get maximum happy from minimum changes. Of course the largest change, besides the floor, are the cabinets.

 We painted the bottoms with Annie Sloan Chalk paint custom mixed by us and the tops with a mix of ASCP 1/2 old white and 1/2 white. Here's a beauty shot of the new hardware and hinges.

Oops. My floor is dirty. I can't believe I took a photo the one time when I have a dirty floor. Oh well. Click here for the low down on painting your own floors.

One of the best things we did was take off a couple of upper cabinet doors to display my teacup collection.

I'm seriously lacking in before pictures, mainly because the kitchen was so bad I never took pictures in there. Here is the eat in area, it's cleared out to be painted but you can feel the log cabin vibe, right?

Marc sprayed the bottom half of the walls white and the top half grey. He is a superior husband.

We updated with light fixtures with new ones from Home Depot.

I probably wouldn't put sconces there myself, but we had to replace the medieval dungeon style ones that were living there with something.

 There's a little desk type area right behind the swinging door that had a bulletin board already installed.

Oh! Can you see that little blue flower on the tile there? Those were scattered all over the back splash and I had to scrape them off with a razor blade. Looks like I missed one. Good times.

And we hung this little guy from IKEA over the stove. I really wanted a small pot rack, but our ceiling is too low. I do like this though.

I hand painted all of the brown grout white, it's easy to do-here's a link to the instructions. And that is about it.

We should conclude with this little gem that demonstrates that no matter how hard you try to get everything ready to photograph, if you have a teenage boy at home you may still end up with your mugs arranged to spell something interesting. But at least they look cute!