Kitchen Face Lift

We've been in our house for 2 1/2 years now and the kitchen is on our list of things to change. It is functional in many ways but it feels dated and dingy. I have many other things that I would rather spend our money on like new carpets (30 year old, brown carpet...yuck!) windows (drafty and our heating bill is not great!) and fencing (little kids playing in our yard on a busy street scares me, especially with Jordyn now wanting to go play outside.) So the kitchen is not going to get changed out. But...could it get some makeup put on it? Yes!

 Each of the drawers and cabinets have this western etching.

 I bought some wood puddy and filled in the etching and then sanded them down so that it looks like you have just flat panelled drawer fronts.

Then I primed and painted them cream.

 Then I distressed them. Jared and I thought that distressing them rather then leaving them plain cream would be better because you wouldn't notice dirt and finger prints as much. We also spray painted the handles silver but after putting them back on, we thought they might have actually gone better when they were the aged gold and brown color. Oh well! (So far we have only spent $10.00 on the kitchen make over, but I am a little annoyed that the money was spent on the silver spray paint for the handles and we are not sure that we  even like how it looks. )

 These are the new cabinets that we put in when we first moved in because we installed the above the range microwave. I love how these turned out. It is easier to distressed things that already have detailing. We started with just painting them cream.

 Then I took some gel stain and rubbed the creases. Afterwards, I took sand paper and scraped off paint here and there.

Jared and I are not sure that we like the lower cabinets very much. It is a change from the western brown cabinets and so to us it is an improvement, but we are not sure that we will keep it. The upper cabinets, we love. So, once we put up the brick back splash and install our new flooring (part of redoing the carpets, we are doing this level in wood floors) then we will see if we will change the cabinets. I have been looking at pictures on pinterest and I really do like the look of two toned cabinets. I saw a kitchen that had both cream distressed cabinets and dark blackish distressed cabinets. I might do that on the bottom ones. We will see. So, in the end, we have only spent $10.00 on our kitchen makeover and it is great. We already had all the paints from our other house projects and so in the end, we love the change and that it was cheep. It took some sweat equity but hey I am home anyways.