Kitchen Before and After

Our house in Minnesota was built in 1983. For your reference, it is 2 years older than me, and it was time for a little updating.

As much as we loved our beautiful cherry cabinets in Omaha...


...we were up for a new lighter color kitchen this time around.

To help with this project, I enlisted the help of my dad, my husband and our dog...well Lola didn't do much but supervise. Here they are getting everything ready to go...cabinet doors and hardware off, paint supplies to the ready.

But let's show you what we're working with first- this was our lovely kitchen after a few months of living in the house.

While the previous owners did a great job updating with stainless steel appliances and granite counter-tops, the unfinished cabinetry just wasn't doing it for us anymore. Plus the bright white large tile squares were a site for sore eyes when you turned on the overhead lights.

So we decided to paint!

Step 1: Prep-All of the cabinet doors and hardware had to come off to be able to paint the full cabinetry.

Step 2: Tape and Drape- This wasn't Ryan's favorite task.

(I can't even believe I'm sharing this picture- everything looks so ridiculously messy I'm about to have a heart attack!)

Step 3: Prime. We did 2 coats of Kilz Clean Start Latex Primer, Sealer and Stain Blocker. Thanks younghouselove.com for the suggestion!

Step 4: Rest. We needed to make sure the primer was dry before we started painting. So we took a break...and so did our supervisor.


Step 5: PAINT! We used one coat of BEHR's semi-gloss paint in Cozy Cottage, and I HIGHLY recommend it. It wasn't too white and not too almondy so things looked dirty...perfectly in between. Once we started putting the color on, I knew we had picked the right one!

And the FINAL RESULT:



We are sooo happy with how the kitchen cabinet painting went! We added a rug to the area to break up the white white white look we had going on, and we had plans to paint the red accent wall later down the road. After adding some new artwork to the walls (thanks Homegoods), we are two happy campers!