9/25/2016

Kitchen Update


I promised I would write a bit about the house. The thing is there has been SO MUCH done on the house since I last wrote about it. It's a bit overwhelming. I decided I would pick out one small project I did and show you that first.
This is what greeted me when I first looked at the house.
Now if you have been following my blog you know that my kitchen has been the bane of my existence since we moved in. Absolutely NO storage space. Cabinets in odd places and just generally dark and unwelcoming.
A brand new coat of paint!

 If you look at my previous posts on my kitchen then you know that I gave it a nice bright coat of white paint with a splash of bright red on that awful stuccoed wall beneath the counter. That helped immensely. Then I went on to mount all the shelves on the walls and make my jars for storage. Another big step that was a great improvement. 
The shelves were a big help.

Now before I go any further I have to point out that these are just stop gap measures. We plan on redoing the kitchen in the future but it is not a priority at all so this may very well be in two or three years. No way to determine how long at this point.

So I decided to redo the space in the counter area. This whole section is my most hated part of the kitchen. It is just a huge stuccoed wall with a hole in the center.  When we moved in it had an ugly curtain hung up there and inside was a shelf. This was my one storage space in the whole kitchen. Ugh!
The finished project.

I first cut down a set of drawers and put in the hole with a makeshift shelf with a few baskets on it. It was serviceable but not very nice to look at. Also the drawers were old and stuck frequently, they also had horrid contact paper inside of them and had a general air of neglect about them. So I completely dismantled the drawers. I took a wire brush and some wd-40 the the drawer slides before remounting them. Then I stripped the contact paper off the drawers, scrubbed them down and sanded them thoroughly. I also sanded the outside structure. Then I painted it all black. I purchased some gorgeous blackened chrome drawer pulls and attached them to the drawers and the finishing touch was this bright polka dot drawer liner. What a difference!


I then took the two old cabinets that had been left behind and sanded them down and painted them the same black, with the new cabinet pulls on them.


My last part of the project was building a nice sturdy shelf for the baskets. I took some nice heavy plyboard and cut and assembled the shelves and then painted them the same black. Also painting the floor of the hole black.

I think this looks so much better. The drawers work like new and the shelf for the baskets is much better than what I had in there before.  I think this will be great until we do redo the kitchen. Sorry that I didn't take pictures of the process, I didn't even think about it till it was all done.

Hope you enjoyed the update. I still have much more to write about but right now it is time to start packing my suitcase. I am heading to the U.S. for a month to catch up on family and friends!