So the next thing on our to do list for the kitchen was to do something with the GAWD awful cabinets. We have a friend, Tony, that is into woodworking and he agreed to make new doors for out cabinets. As you can see from the pictures the actual cabinets are in good shape, but they’re a dark brown. The doors are particalboard covered in a manilla-colored laminate with wooden handles. Ug-a-lee! Not our style at all.
So we decided to have Tony make the doors out of oak. We gave him all the measurements of the 30 something doors and drawer fronts, all of which are different sizes, by the way. Ugh. While he was working on that, we took all the doors and drawer fronts off, cleaned out all the cabinets, and started sanding the cabinets down. A lot of work! Every few days we would get a stack of doors and drawer fronts. We would sand those down and stain them, which would take about 3 days. Once we had the cabinets completely sanded down, we stained the existing cabinets with the stain we were using on the doors/drawer fronts. We decided on the hidden hinges and I had a very difficult time deciding on what handles and/or knobs I wanted to use. After changing my mind about 4 times, I finally settled on some handles that I absolutely love!
Another issue with the kitchen was that there’s a teeny-tiny excuse of a pantry seen here. Next to the pantry you can see how the bar wraps around, which is a total waste of space. We changed our plan several times with what to do with this wall, because we kept coming up with better ideas. We decided to have Tony build a wall to ceiling pantry and get rid of the bar extension.
And again here’s the before picture of the pantry wall.
Here’s the results of the now very useful space.
Cabinet Hardware
So now that we have all that done, when our financial situation gets back to normal we will be ripping out all the tile on the countertops and backsplash and replace with something more modern. Then the linoleum on the floors will be replaced with some nice ceramic tiles. I’d also like to put some recessed lighting in and get rid of the parlor type chandelier!
Coming up next…Just more pictures of my kitchen and eating area.