So, if you happen to have read my last full post, you might have noticed a little blurb about re-doing my kitchen cabinets. As previously stated, Dan was not thrilled with the idea, but after a year of begging, and pleading he relented, the day before the kitchen disaster. As it turns out none of the cabinets had to be replaced so by the time the whole mess was completely settled, nearly a month later we were still at square one. Dan had relented on the condition that I only use birthday money (meaning I don't spend precious money from our paychecks on the project) and I do all the work myself. He kindly suggested I get to work prior to my birthday because sanding them down was going to take a while. Especially since I was doing it by hand. That lasted about two hours and one cupboard door, and then I called my dear brother and pleaded for his power sander, I promptly fell in love. With the power sander that is. It made the project doable, and it was glorious watching that awful orange finish come off. This quickly took over my life. If I was awake and Shad was asleep it was pretty well a guarantee that I was sanding down cupboard doors. I was a little hesitant to start prior to my birthday since the financing for the project depended on me getting enough gift cards to pay for primer and paint, however I figured no finish at all was better than how they were, and jumped right in. Thankfully, due to very generous family, following my birthday I had more than enough to cover the costs. THANK YOU!!!! My wonderful husband acknowledged he would like me to just get it done quickly and was very understanding to the upheaval that became our house. In the name of cupboards he didn't want (he really really dislikes white cabinets) he put up with shopping going undone, dishes sitting in the sink, laundry piling and even coming home one night to a kitchen so torn up he couldn't even cook himself dinner. He even forgave me for not calling and warning him, so he had nothing to eat at nine when he got home. Slowly but surely I finished up with the sanding and moved on to priming the cabinet frames twice, re-sanding them and painting them. I refrained from jumping around with excitement in front of Dan, but many family members and close friends got daily text updates and pictures as I completed each step. All that was left was the doors. I primed them front and back twice, then re-sanded (thankfully this only took a few hours total whereas the initial sanding took an hour per door.) The doors were finally ready to be painted and my wonderful brother came over three nights in a row to help me paint them with his paint sprayer. Friday night they were at last dry enough to touch and I brought them all in and spent well into the night putting all of the hardware back on each door while talking with my younger brother who was in town this weekend. He kept me company, although unfortunately he didn't prevent me from doing a good portion of the work with the wrong screwdriver before I finally found the correct one stashed in a cupboard. (Despite using a power drill at work before to drill into fractured bones, I was nervous to screw my hardware in with one, go figure . . .) My right hand has the blisters to prove this is a bad idea. Saturday morning I hung all of the doors back up, and put the knobs on. After looking at Lowe's and Home Depot I had been horrified to find out just how expensive cabinet knobs were. I had concluded that it would really help to finish off the look and make a huge difference in keeping the white paint clean, but didn't want to spend that much on hardware. Luckily, I decided to look at Target online and found some great ones that were half the price. Even better, to get all of them would cost me exactly what I had on a few gift cards laying around from Mother's Day and other gifts!!! That meant I still had a pretty good chunk of change left over, and decided to splurge on a beautiful new faucet. Saturday afternoon my amazing father-in-law came over and spent the better part of his day taking out my old faucet and putting in my new one. Project complete and I LOVE IT!!!! Obviously, it is far from perfect, but I feel pretty dang good about it. Nothing gives you a sense of accomplishment quite like learning something new and seeing a project through. Truthfully, there is no way I could appreciate it without doing the work myself, and if I had not had to wait a year I am pretty sure I would have struggled keeping a positive attitude throughout the ordeal. But, after over three weeks of work, and miraculously no tears (related to this project at least ;op) it is over. It was worth every bit of work to go from this:
To this:
Thank you Dan for letting me "ruin" our cabinets-especially since I had no clue what I was doing! And thanks to everyone who pitched in through gifts or even just listening to me blab about it whenever I got excited about it!!!!
