Kitchen Reinvigoration

I will not call what we are doing to our kitchen a remodel. A remodel is when you spend lots of money, get to drool over brand new kitchen appliances and pick out your favorites to embed in your sea of new custom cabinetry, complete with built-in espresso/cappuccino machine and your old black fridge (2000 vintage) which is waaaaaaaaaaay better than the piece of crap Kenmore you have in your current kitchen. Yep, what we WANT versus what we are GETTING can be easily defined as the distance between Okinawa and Hawaii.

So, we are not remodeling. We are reinvigorating, by completely repainting every surface of our kitchen and springing for some actual door handles (oooo, door HANDLES...you mean we don't have to grab the edge of the cabinet door with our fingernails any more??), some spray paint to camouflage the existing hinges to sort of match the new handles, and 2 (yes, two!) new light fixtures.

It might help to picture why this is necessary. You see, the '70s called...they want our kitchen back. Yes, I know those plywood cabinets with mid-tone brown oak veneer were oh-so-fashionable circa 1973, but they really don't cut it in 2007. And the oh-so-lovely orange wallpaper and matching orange paint, showing through the poor paint job of the previous owners, really was crying out for improvement. (As an aside, may I note that their paint job was SO bad, I was literally wiping off paint when I used a regular kitchen cleaner on the wall next to our garbage can? But I digress.)

Worst of all are the painted, yes, I said painted, formica countertops. Orange formica. Bright orange formica. Showing in places where the green marble faux paint was chipped off the edges and surfaces of the countertops. There is only one word for this: ewwwww.

The kitchen was supposed to be the crowning glory of modernization. When we moved into this house ten months ago, we had a budget of $15,000 set aside to renovate the kitchen. Then, the fleas came. A flea infestation...and we found out my husband is allergic to flea bites. We bombed the house, twice. We had a professional pest control company come and treat. We bought a top of the line Dyson and I vacuumed the carpets three times a day. And still, they came. We came to the conclusion that the kitchen remodel would have to wait, and pulled the trigger on a whole house hardwood floor. Beautiful...and $14,500 later, our kitchen remodel budget was *poof*. *sigh*

So, I was going to tough it out with the existing kitchen. I figured somehow, we would find a way to pay for a new kitchen sometime soon. However, given that I am not working, and am not likely to be working anytime soon, I broached the subject with DH of freshening up our kitchen. Much to my surprise, DH suggested doing it straight away, so this past weekend we dug in, took off the cabinet doors, and sanded down both countertop & cabinets on one side of the kitchen. We primed everything, including the walls, and systematically painted the walls, then the cabinet frames & doors, then the countertops. We figured we would try to repaint the formica, and if that failed or looked horrible, we would buy some off-the-rack laminate countertops and install them ourselves. This would have been a riskier option, though, as we aren't sure how the cabinet frames would hold up.

In any case, this is not necessary, because the repainted countertops look darn good. In fact, it all looks darn good, which makes the sweat equity worth it. DH & I had our customary DIY spats about how to get things done, and I ended up doing the bulk of the paintwork while DH distracted our daughter and played with our son. I pretty much served as the lunch wagon as required, and got back to work when he was done. Given DH's tendency to slap on paint quickly when he's tired, I preferred to work slowly and steadily through everything (although I got a bit sloppy at the end, myself).

We now have lovely, tasteful creamy latte colored walls, cream cabinetry, and milk chocolate colored countertops. I polyurethaned the countertops yesterday to seal them (a pain in the rear since I had to move our parrot to our bedroom for the day to avoid the fumes, which she was NOT happy about). DH reinstalled the sink last night, and I nearly wept with joy when I saw that water beaded up on the surface of our countertops! Oh, the simplest things that give me pleasure nowadays. So for a total cost of $350 (which includes the take-out meals for last weekend and this coming weekend, from the kitchen being a disaster zone), we have a new look in our kitchen and I think we can definitely live with it for a few more years. Hooray! Now I just have to vacuum up the zillions of dust particles that came down with the plastic sheeting we taped over the open cabinets while we painted. I guess that Dyson has paid for itself after all.