Cosmetic Cabinetry

   Clearly we've come a long way in six months if we're now concerned with the cabinets. When we first moved in, the cabinetry, unattractive though it may have been, was the only thing the kitchen had going for it. 

   So Pete and I have officially run headlong into a home renovation phenomena. It seems that when you manage to redo three and a half rooms in a house with a handful of tools, four paint brushes, sheetrock, a mile of moulding and several gallons of paint, caulk and liquid nails, you then start to be bothered by what seemed perfectly fine just a few months before. Humans are so silly. 

   So here we are with nothing better to do than reface the cabinets. I found this idea on a blog where the people clearly know what they are doing. It is a project that involves paintable beadboard wallpaper and what Pete calls "sticks".

And this is how it turns out.

   So here is my latest non-problem. Though I really like both the 'casual afternoon' of the cabinets and the 'cool cucumber' of the walls, it would seem that 'cucumber' and 'sage' simply do not go well together - a perfect example of my complete lack of the 'color gene' to which I have alluded before.

   But screw it, I think we can live with this for a while. And if not, well...Stephen at Steward's Hardware will talk me through it yet again.

   And now, just for the drama of the thing, and because I recently found this picture of our very first morning here...

And now...six months later

You wouldn't recognize that sweatshirt I was wearing either.

Let The Work Begin

On October 13th we closed on the house in the morning and then took a picnic lunch and went directly to our new home. The night before we had purchased compound, tape and paint to begin work on a raw kitchen. Pete immediately got down to taping and his first round of compound, tasks he had never done before, and I primed the  wall opposite to the kitchen. Since there was so much to do in the house, our initial strategy was to work on the main front room which included the living, dining and kitchen areas all in one open space. The kitchen posed the most problems.

The day after purchase and the second compound application

We needed to finish the walls off because they had been left as mismatched scraps of sheetrock. The windows were just that - windows with no frames.  Wires were protruding from the walls in several places because it seemed that the previous owners liked their fixtures so much that they took them when they left. After Pete had worked on the walls for some time he realized that they would never be the smooth surfaces he had hoped for. Rather than starting over with new sheetrock, we chose to camouflage the problem with shelves. Those posed their own set of problems but we are quite pleased with the outcome.

Our kitchen two months later