WoW Home Remodeling course 2.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Remodel a kitchen in 3 days for $300.
The wife and I just redid the kitchen, nothing major; refinished the cabinets, remodeled a few pieces, new hardware etc. First a bit about the kitchen. When we moved in, the kitchen was a bit outdated, almost immediately we purchased new appliances (the previous owners had put in a new dishwasher and stovetop about a year before we bought it). Luckily the sink and faucet were fairly new. All the cabinets are at least 20 years old and hand made. For the size of our house (1900+ sq. feet) the kitchen is kind of small, maybe in and of itself 350 sq. ft. It is also a open kitchen. It is part of this one large room that is 15' wide and about 28' long. It runs from the front of the house to the back. It basically begins with a front door entry foyer, to a dining room, and then ends in the open kitchen. Becuase the kitchen is open and the kitchen cabinets are spacious, it feels a lot bigger, and we don't have any storage issues.

Some pics of the kitchen about a month before we moved in:

You can immediately see the need for painting. Most of the paint was older, and faded, or discolored. You can also see the 50 year old oven, that was always at about 100 degrees, and would not really close. You can also see this ugly brick around the kitchen (fake brick, 1/4" brick sheeting) and lining the oven column, the kitchey country look, and top it off, and what you cannot see is a this stencilled pink ribbon motif that went around the top of the room . . . Be lucky you cannot see it.

So, the wife and I had some decisions, we cannot afford to remodel the kitchen right now, but had to get out of country kishce Hell. We needed something that would last at least the next ten years or so. So we decided to paint the cabinets (especially since they are in pretty good shape), the brick, and the walls, and get new modern hardware. I addition, the brick was starting to fall down in the center column where the oven was, so we decided to pull it down.

Malach is particular about his paint, and uses only Behr paint. While you will spend a bit more for it (as much as $30 a gallon), I find it's wearablity, color fastness, and ability to take abuse unmatched. We went with a color pattern similar to our dishes, and decide upon the best design for the colors, going with a modernist look; we also bought the hardware, nothing too fancy, but minimalist looking, spending about $300 total for paint and hardware. We then knocked all the brick off the center stack (Leaving a pretty unsightly mess of stuck on concrete), removed all the cabinet doors, and primed everything. I also plastered the center column to blend the old brick cement in something textural (looks real nice, hard to see in the pics. Then everything was painted a nice off white, except for the cabinet doors and drawer fronts; including the ceiling and beams in the ceiling (a kind of white wash). Cabinet doors painted with a fresh spring green, and the drawer faces, and deep blue. After painting, I reinstalled everything with new hardware.

This would have taken two days if my elbow did not blow out (see my blog for the story).

Here are the final photos from the same angles, and yes the pink ribbon is gone.

Ahh, next is the dining room, which I will be doing in far eastern style.

Malach brings you the dirt on Hobbs and Piper
This was a few years ago when they were lumberjacks.

I am Malach and you may call me Bob Villa.