2 years - kitchen

Usually I have a post about my previous week on Mondays but this week is a very special week, two years ago we closed on our house and two days later I started this blog. Last year I shared a photo of our house circa 1938 (?). This year I want to show the progress we have made so far. Let's start with the kitchen...

I can still remember when we drove to the house after the closing, vacuum and other cleaning supplies in hand to clean a couple of rooms and prep them for painting. Well we didn't have any power because the previous owners didn't pay their bills in a while. It was a Friday evening and of course we couldn't get power until Monday but we still managed to paint two rooms over the weekend. We wanted to get done as much as possible before moving in a month later. In early May my parents came over from Germany to help with the house and the move. One thing we wanted to change as soon as possible and before running out of steam was the kitchen. P and I both didn't like anything about the kitchen, it was not our style and we didn't like the colors either but a kitchen renovation was not in the budget and the cabinets were still pretty new and in good shape. So I planned to paint everything. First the kitchen needed a good scrub, everything was super greasy. We cleaned the top of the cabinets three times and they were still sticky. The area above the range had stalactites out of grease dangling from the ceiling. Yuck! My parents were nice enough to sand all the kitchen cabinets and doors so I could paint them which took a couple of weeks (or months) to finish. I even painted the tile backsplash and contrary to all the negative things I had read about painting tile it still looks like the day I finished painting. You can find some pictures of the whole process here.

All in all we painted the cabinets (doors and visible parts), tile backsplash, walls, window and door frames, ceiling, base and crown molding, changed all the handles, replaced missing hinges, switched out the light fixture, as well as the range, microwave and the dishwasher. Because there was too much unused space in the middle of the room we later added an island that we snatched up on sale at IKEA. Quite a change from the before...