Kitchen, Before / After

This is the kitchen that came with the house.  Evidently, one of the prior owners did woodwork, because these cabinets are not stock cabinets.  I decided I wanted to paint them black and change out the hardware to a brushed nickel.  Remember, me saying my mom thought I had lost my mind when we bought the Barnominium, well, Her comment to this, "Black?".  This is a second home, so a gut job is not in the budget and will not be, but I had to do something with it.

Before pictures:

See, the end on the lower cabinet.  It has only spice rack depth shelves in the front and no way to access the back of the cabinet.  We thought we had found a secret hiding place.  Shucks, no found money, just wasted space.  Scroll down, to see what we did with it.

After pictures, a whole new look and I love it! Fabulous on a Beer Budget!

The door with the brown trim, is where the furnace is.  Weird, right?  So, I painted it with chalk board paint.

Messages from guest!

This is what I used, First a primer, because I was painting over wood then the Chalk Paint.

 If you have a ugly kitchen, You Can Change it too!  I will tell you how we did it.  It was time consuming, but not hard.  First you have to take all the doors off.  You want to use tape to number doors with the opening that it came from.  Our cabinets were pretty rough and didn't have much of a clear coat on them.  So, I just gave them a light sanding.  Clean all the dust off.  Now, I picked out Brushed Nickel hardware to match the holes that the cabinet doors already had.  But if you pick out something that doesn't match up, You will have to put wood filler in the holes and sand.  I used Valspar Paint with Primer from Lowes, New Black 4011-1.  I used saw horses to lay my doors on to paint.  I did the backs first.  Let them dry! Then I painted the fronts.  Let them dry! I used a good quality brush and a roller.  I painted the insides of my base cabinets as well.  The hardest part......putting the hinges back on. Even thou, I bought the same exact style, the holes were off just enough to require drilling new holes. And, Make sure the screws are the right length, and don't go thru your cabinet doors. (We had this problem with my parents cabinets) If you have questions, feel free to email me or post a question.  I got rid of the Orange, this color was any many rooms in the house.  I painted it with Valspar, Cut Ruby 1009-4.

Here is the cabinet with the wasted space, that I talked about above. 

First, we had to cut the hole bigger.

Then build a bottom

Add the hardware, purchased from Lowes

Borrow a upper cabinet door.  What? Is that weird?

Ta Da! A pull out garbage can.

                                     What about that cabinet door that you borrowed.....

Here is the blank space.....A beverage center with wine bottle rack. I will putting in a  wine glass stem rack next trip over.  We ordered them from Amazon.com.  I wish I could claim credit to the wine bottle rack idea, but I found it on Pinterest.  It is PVC pipe cut and stacked.  I did paint mine thou, with spray paint for plastic.

On the Thanksgiving Trip we got the stemware rack installed and we put some trim up on the shelves. And, before our trip, I made a run to our local winery, Old Millington Winery, www.oldmillingtonwinery.com/   for some Christmas Plum to add to the bottle rack. What do you think?