Painting Our Kitchen Cabinets

Good morning friends! We have officially been in our house for over a week and are loving every minute! We also added a new family member.... say hi to Sophie:

Sophie our goldendoodle came into our lives last Tuesday and is the best impulse purchase we've ever made! She is the sweetest girl and we have had the most fun this past week getting to know her. 

Anyways, back to the point of this post! We decided our first project in the new house was going to be to paint the kitchen cabinets. I really had my heart set on having white cabinets and Tim was more than game to get rid of the ugly wood color.

Here are some before pictures:

There was no hardware on the cabinets or drawers so no holes to fill which was great but we still had a ton of work to do!

We started by removing all the cabinet and drawer fronts. We created a label for each one to alphabetically connect it to the area where it needed to be reattached. This was great in concept but that system fell apart while painting. It wasn't hard to figure out where everything got reattached because our kitchen isn't huge, but if yours is you may want to work harder then we did to keep a system like this. 

Once everything was down we set up two painting stations; one on the kitchen island and one on a table in the living room. We both got to work priming all the doors, drawers and shelves, there were a LOT!

I think Tim wanted to kill me when I mentioned that I wanted to paint the inside of the cabinets as well. Once we started and I realized what a huge project it was, I decided to stop and not do the cabinets above the the microwave and fridge or the lower ones. The ones we will open all the time (plates, bowls, pantry, cups, etc) will be white but the rest will be unfinished inside.

I was mostly in charge of sanding, cleaning, priming and doing the first coat of paint. I left Tim take the lead on all final coats and putting the hardware on. Anyone else not as patient as your SO? Tim is so much more patient than I am and his painting always looks so much cleaner than mine. 

We spent a whole week getting this project done! It took us several nights after work and two full weekend days in order to get everything looking perfect.

It was truly a bigger job than we originally thought. We are certainly learning as we go around here!

We also took SO many trips to Home Depot to keep getting more supplies. Some of the things we found useful during this project were:

Plastic Drop Cloths  I would've preferred to get a more environmentally friendly drop cloth but we needed several of them since we were working in so many different areas while waiting for things to try. Having several of these plastic drop cloths that we could use and then toss was helpful for us.

Blue Painters Tape This came in handy for keeping our walls and appliances paint free!

Painters Tripods  These were a pain in the butt but helpful at the same time. We used them to hold up all the cabinets doors and shelves as we were painting so they wouldn't stick to the surface and we would be able to paint all the sides.

We also took down the microwave (I mean, Tim took down the microwave) so we would be able to get in and paint a little more closely. 

The night before we moved in when we left it looked like this! Everything was done and painted but just needed to be reattached. Tim was leaving work early on the day we moved so he could meet the Verizon Internet guy to connect our Wifi so he planned on attaching all the hardware and reattaching all the doors where they belonged. 

Ready for some afters??

I love it!!!

Lets do some side by side before and afters....

                        

  

                    

This is just the beginning!! We got our new appliances in this past Saturday and we plan on doing the counters at some point as well. So many projects, so little time!

I will share all about our new appliances soon!