Kitchen Make Over

A few years ago we were finally lucky enough to start house shopping and let me tell you something, it was not a simple task. I wanted a house so bad that I was ready to put in an offer on everything we saw and I mean everything. I started looking in cities that didn't even make sense for us to live in. I was even crazy enough to want to put an offer in on house that had different flooring in almost every room on the main floor (I think it was about 6 different types), which none of them were truly finished and didn't transition well with each other. I'm also pretty sure that wasn't the worst thing about the house either. I was just so excited! Luckily, I had Matt to keep me on the straight and narrow path and remind me what we were looking for and what we could afford. I swear to you, I think we put offers on about 8 different houses before something finally stuck. Yay! It did need some work but not too overwhelming. When we moved in, we knew what our first project to tackle was... the Kitchen!

Here is the only picture that I have of our kitchen before. It wasn't horrible. It had nice countertops and had fresh paint on the walls. It only had a few things we needed to change. The cabinets were still in great shape so we decided to paint them. Our first step was to take out all the drawers and take off all the doors. Then clean them. Easiest way to clean them is to us some sort of TSP. Gets the grease and grime right off. Then we lightly sanded everything down. Next we needed to prime everything. 

Then it was time for the paint. We used Benjamin Moore Advance Alkyd Paint. We chose to paint them a shade of white so it took a few good coats to cover well.

We wanted to get some new hardware for the drawers. So we got some new drawer pulls for them. After all the painting and new drawer pulls it still wasn't quite what we were wanting. It was missing something. So we decided to tackle something I have never done, backsplash. Luckily Matt has done some tile work so he knew what he was doing. 

I was so surprised at how much better it looked once we got the backsplash up. It made me rethink if I got the right color of grout. I planned on just doing white grout and then I second guessed myself and was thinking maybe I should have done grey or something. But in the end we decided to stick with the white grout.

Which we are so happy we did. After we got everything cleaned up, it was time to start putting the plug face plates back on and to put things back on the counter.

It's so crazy to me how much of a difference this made for me. It seems to make my kitchen feel so much brighter and surprisingly feel a little bigger. I was so happy that this was the first project we tackled in our new house. It made the house start really feeling like our home.