What a difference paint can make....

So I started my "little" kitchen painting project the week before Labor Day, thinking, "I have two weeks off of tutoring...let's get a little project done....".  Well, projects always take longer than you think, and this one is no exception!  I just packed away the final paint brush, and MY does it feel good!  So let me fill you in on my project...

GOALS

Goal 1: Paint kitchen cabinets white (inside and out) to create a cleaner, brighter, newer look in the kitchen.

Inside of drawers and cabinets were icky 1970 wood; outside was light brown

Goal 2: Remove the scalloping on the top of cabinets

Original Scalloped Top

Goal 3: Remove chair rail in kitchen and dining room (was a painted, narrow, board hung on the wall around the kitchen and dining room with no detailing) and paint walls one color to simplify look.

PROCESS

1) Label all cabinet doors with post-it note numbers and make a key to know which doors go back on which cabinet.  Remove all hardware, hinges, and doors from cabinets.  Colton loved helping with the power screwdriver and Summer organized my hardware and screws for me!

2) Sand all cabinets and doors, front and back, with power sander. Wipe down all doors with water.  (Summer helped me wipe the cabinets down).  This step also required a ton of cleaning the kitchen after sanding the inside part, since we still had to live, eat, and cook in the areas that I sanded.

This was my sanding station for the cabinet doors to keep the dust mostly outside.  I did have to sand the actual cabinets inside the kitchen which did generate dust!

3) Steal hubby's garage stall for a month.  Lay cabinet doors on floor along with their "numbers".  Ready for painting.

4) Remove items from half the cabinets (I didn't have space to empty all of them at the same time!).  UG!  It was definitely hard to live like this for quite a few days!

5) Prime, Prime, Prime, Paint, Paint, Paint.  Yes, I probably did 6 coats on everything!   The doors (out in the garage) took a lot of time because I had to wait until the front dried before I could flip and do the back.

6) Organize and replace items, and repeat steps 4 and 5 for the other half of the kitchen.  This organizing step wasn't planned, but did feel good.  After taking everything I owned out of the cabinets, I realized there were a lot of things I didn't use or need.  Also, because I organized my kitchen when we moved in, pre-kids, all the kids' stuff was thrown in "where it fit" instead of in an organized manner.  After organizing, I actually feel like I have a lot more cabinet space, AND the insides feel SO much cleaner!

7) Re-attach hinges and hardware, and replace doors.

8) Remove chair rail.

FYI: it is a mistake to peel paint that is peeling off from under the chair rail....it brought the top layer of drywall with it :(  Live and learn! 

9) Mud. I did more coats than I can count of mudding in the kitchen and dining room where the chair rail was to smooth the wall so I could paint it (and to cover the above section of drywall)  It was my first experience mudding.  I liked parts of it...it was actually quite therapeutic, like frosting a cake with thick frosting...it was a pretty fun texture to work with!  I also liked that it washed off everything with just water (unlike paint) if you got it someplace you shouldn't.  The hardest part of mudding is that you have to take 24 hours for it to dry in between coats, and you have to do a lot of coats.  The other hard part is that you have to sand in between coats, and the particles of drywall go EVERYWHERE making a fine dusty mist over every surface in the kitchen and dining room.  Because we cooked/ate/tutored/lived in this space daily I spent as much time deep cleaning the kitchen as I did mudding.  Whew.  SO glad to be done with this step!!

10) Paint walls brown.

11) Paint window and door trim white.  Several coats on each.

12) Ask my handsome, talented, hubby to rewire the outlets so I could put a clean white light switches and plug-in's in place of the off white ones that had previous paint splotches on them.  Thanks, honey :-).

OUTCOME

I have a few more decorative details I'll be looking to do on the walls, etc, but the hard labor and messy part is DONE!  It's pretty fun to see what a few gallons of paint (and a lot of man-hours) can do to transform a space!

Before

After