Kitchen Renovation Progress - Part 1

I promise I would post the "after" picture at the end of this week but I thought it is fun to show you the progress first. During the planning, Chris and I made decisions to save money by not replacing things that are still working and to work on "easy" thing we can do ourselves. So we keep the working appliances, the upper and side cabinet, and doing the painting ourselves.

1. Painting the cabinet 
First thing first: unscrew the cabinet doors and pack up all the stuffs

   Ahhhh so much better now

 

Being a reader, I like to read tutorial on websites or blogs. On the contrary, being a visual learner, Chris prefers to watch video tutorials at YouTube and according to one YouTube video using paint sprayer is an easy way to paint those cabinet doors.

However, he learned that paint sprayer is messy, hard to control, and used up way too much paint. Young House Love was right after all. The best way to paint those cabinets is with roller, good brush, and Benjamin Moore Advance paint. More detail on their tutorial can be found here.

How it looks like after some reorganization and the renovation is finished:  

The project took us my super hubby about a week from start to finish:

Then he installed the "jewelries"/ hard wares aka door handles. We got ours from Home Depot. Again we followed Young House Love's advised to use the Liberty Hardware guides from Home Depot to mark tiny holes accurately and evenly. 

For the side cabinet I got these numbers handles from Big Lots for $10:

 

The next thing we did was
2. Painting the wall

First we need to apply the primer
Good thing Chris didn't take picture from the front. I was so excited and giddy to finally paint the wall for the first time. 

After 2 coats of primer:

b. Choosing paint color. The samples was on sale for $2.50 per can at OSH. We think it's totally worth it because it's hard to make decision with tiny paint swatches. I learned from a friend who made a mistake by buying 5 gallons of paint then realized it's not exactly the color that she had in mind.

Guess which one we chose to be our new kitchen color?

 

The first one! After living with red kitchen for 6+ years, we were more than ready to have a light and airy kitchen. The color we chose was Benjamin Moore Grey Tint  

 

Next is the hard and messy part....