I dream of KITCHENS..

I love kitchens.   I'm not that great of a cook, and I'd rather do pretty much anything than wash a sink of dishes, but I love the look of them.  LOL.  So in trying to figure out WHAT in the world we were going to do with this mess of a kitchen we inherited, I looked at a LOT of kitchens.  I looked at new kitchens, old kitchens, small kitchens, and large kitchens.  One of my favorites that I found, is the kitchen over at The Lettered Cottage.  In fact, when our reno is complete, you'll probably see a lot of familiar things between her kitchen and mine.   What I love about it, is that fact that she took plain builder stock cabinets and made them unique..  as seen here. Completely awesome when you're on a budget and cannot afford new cabinets..  which, is so us.

The only problem here, is that she was able to add trim to the top of her cabinets, because they were hung from the wall and there was a large space above them.

Since our cabinets are hung from the wall AND this ugly THING above them, there was no way to create that gap without really getting DIRTY.

Since I haven't given a tour of what our kitchen DID look like... here is the complete before.  It is not done yet, but thankfully it doesn't look like this anymore.  haha.

Excuse my husband, who usually ends up in my photos whether intentional or not. 

So, it is hard to tell here, but we're actually pretty lucky that our cabinets are really nice quality.  They're not the normal knock off wood cabinets that most homes come with today.  They are really heavy hardwood that I've been able to sand down and play with.   These suckers will last a lifetime.  Another reason, besides money, not to get rid of them.   I wish I had a better before image to show you, but I guess I was so excited to get started, I forgot to take more adequate before photos.

Our first step with this kitchen was removing the horrible wallpaper.  I've actually never removed wallpaper, so I turned to an article over at HGTV.com to guide me through it.  Armed with DIF and a scraper, it started coming off pretty well... until we got to about the fourth layer.  This layer, it seemed, was stuck directly to the sheetrock.  YIKES.   Unfortunately what I wanted to be a smooth surface to work with, ended up looking like half sheetrock, half cardboard.   Luckily, my FIL is pretty handy, and fixed our big mess.

haha, you have to love that photo of my FIL and his texture sprayer!

This was right before the spraying began.  My husband first put on a thin skim coat, which was allowed to dry for a few days, followed by a skim coat by my FIL.  The next day it was ready to spray.  Trying to match the original orange peel texture on the other walls was interesting, but I think they did a GREAT job!

More to come!