Kitchen Renovation

As I was going back through last year's pictures, I realized I didn't document the change that took place in the kitchen in August, September, and October, and the amount of time it took to complete it. Let's just say it took a while. Here are some before pics...

In this picture, you can kinda see what the dining room before picture looked like...

And here are some after pics...

It took 4 coats of paint inside and outside the cabinets to make them look decent. Shaun finally took my advice one day and took the cabinet doors outside and used his paint sprayer to make the doors look fabulous. Then he used some molding to update the fronts of the doors. We had seen something like it in the Lowe's Creative ideas magazine and thought, "Hey that doesn't look too complicated..." It's not that it was complicated, it just took some time. I love it now though, especially with the 70's wallpaper gone and the dark wood paneling gone with it in the dining room.

Oh...the wallpaper...that was another story. Not sure if I will ever use wallpaper in any house we ever build because it sure is a PAIN to take down, especially after 40 years of really adhering to the wall.

The fridge in the before pics kept on dying on us every few days because the coils would freeze over. So we would have to take out everything, use a hairdryer to unfreeze the coils then put everything back in. After a month or so of doing this, we were a little frustrated. Then we saw this fridge at the Lugoff Elementary PTO silent auction and thought we would try to bid on it and see if we could be the highest bidder without spending too much money. We knew our limit and it came down to a few minutes left in the auction and it was between us and this other guy who kept bidding on it...and we won it at the last second. I was so excited! Then we get the fridge home and it's an inch too wide to fit in the previous fridge opening. So we had two options. Shaving off some of the cabinets, or putting it in the opening where we had some of our pantry items. So we decided it was less work to put it in the "pantry" and that option would give us a little more space in the kitchen. I'm glad we went with the latter.

It was a major undertaking, but the finished project was all worth it and it hardly cost any money for a completely different looking kitchen and dining room.