In our previous home, we did a dramatic yet budget friendly DIY kitchen makeover, which mostly consisted of painting our old cabinets. It really came out fantastically, and held up really well over the the 10+ years we lived in that house. No chipping, no yellowing. They still looked great. We did a few other custom touches like new hardware, a curtain to give the illusion of a farmhouse sink, a section of open shelving, and curtains inserted in panels of two cabinet doors get the look I wanted. I’m still amazed how good that stainless steel oven hood looked after some serious elbow grease.
Pop on over HERE to see the dark and dreary BEFORE compared to the bright and cheery AFTER! It really was a dramatic difference. The only other thing I’d wanted to do in that kitchen was replace countertops, but they were perfectly functional so we never got around to doing it.
New {old} house, new {old} kitchen.
When we moved to our 1962 ranch home, the kitchen was perfectly okay but not amazing and not what I’d have done. But because it had been redone, I didn’t feel justified ripping everything out of our okay-kitchen.
Sometime the first year or so we lived there, my cousin Jonnia came to visit and said she was surprised it didn’t bother me that the sink wasn’t centered under the window. WHAT? HOW HAD I NOT NOTICED? That sort of thing drives me crazy but I must’ve been in denial and had overlooked it until she pointed it out and then I could not un-see it!
Even so, we left it alone. It was a perfectly okay kitchen, and although we planned to re-do it someday, we weren’t in a rush.
About four years later, right at the beginning of the pandemic — when nobody had any idea what was happening and everything was just beginning to shut down — we had a MAJOR but hidden water leak. We only found out about it when the water bill came in at nearly ten times what it usually was! The next few weeks were spent finding a plumber and having a specialist attempt to locate the leak.
Meanwhile, we kept the water meter turned off except for a few times a day when we’d flush all the toilets and take super-fast showers. Fun times.
Eventually we determined the leak was under our slab foundation so we had two options: jackhammer it up and hope we found the right spot, or bypass it all and run new lines. We chose option two. Since all our plumbing is on one main wall, which happens to be in the kitchen, we had to tear out a wall of cabinets and rip out the sheetrock so the plumbers could do what they needed to do.
AFTER the repair.
I consider this our Part One “AFTER” because this was a make-do situation.
Since a pandemic is NOT the ideal time to remodel, we mostly just put it all back together, perfectly happy to have running water!
Minor changes we did make included:
1) getting rid of the over-the-stove microwave and replacing it with a basic stainless steel hood;
2) leaving doors off two sets of upper cabinets to I test how I truly felt about open shelving;
3) getting rid of the backsplash tile;
4) and finally, new cabinet knobs and pulls, plus a coat of paint a bit more cream colored than the previous stark white.
We had to destroy the corner cabinet in order to get it out so that left a gap we opted to live with for a while. And the sink was still off-center because moving it wasn’t feasible without tearing up more cabinetry. We didn’t much mind because we were so relieved to have a functioning kitchen again.
However, we did start planning what we’d like to do eventually. Several years later we finally began that process. Coming soon: the somewhat slow DIY process and our AFTER-after!
Avid reader; tea aficionado; wannabe gardener. Fan of sunshine, shag dancing, & semicolons. Probably hanging out with my dog.
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