It’s been a journey! When we first purchased our house two years ago, I knew I would eventually paint the oak cabinets. Fast forward many months later, we have now upgraded walls, lighting, appliances, countertop, cabinets and tile! Now that it’s finished, I am super excited with how it has turned out! I hope you can take away some useful tips and learn from the mistakes I made along the way.
STEP 1: WALLS AND LIGHTING
Before we officially moved in, the first thing I did was get rid of the yellow paint! If you read the living room remodel post, you saw the light gray we used in the connected living room. I wanted to separate the spaces using color since it’s a fully open concept living/kitchen area. I chose to use a dark gray-blue to add contrast. We also replaced all of the lighting:
STEP 2: THE CABINETS
It took a year of being in our home before I finally got up the courage to paint our oak cabinets! Now that it’s done, I’m SO GLAD I did! The difference is night and day. Sorry for the mess 😉
Let me start by saying, milk paint is amazing. It has the best self-leveling properties of all the paints I’ve used. When I decided to start this project, I did some research online and found several people who’d had luck simply de-glossing and painting their cabinets with milk paint, sans primer. I decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately it didn’t end up working for my situation. The reason? OAK GRAIN for days. Do I think it would work in some cases? Yes, but not if your cabinets have a deep grain that you want fully covered. When all was said and done, I ended up filling in the grain with a diluted wood filler, re-sanding, and re-spraying with a paint-and-primer-in-one.
Long story short… it ended up being a longer process than I had anticipated. But I would do it again in a heart beat. I love my brighter, lighter kitchen! If you’d like a more detailed tutorial based on my experience, click here!
Part 3: THE BACKSPLASH
Of course once the cabinets were painted I realized I COULDN’T stop there! I had to redo the square tile backsplash… I didn’t feel like taking on the mess and hassle of tearing them out, so I took to the internet and started searching for products I could use to paint them! Yep, those bad boys are painted and stenciled. Every. Last. One. Time consuming? Yes… but totally worth it. You can read more about how I did this here.
STEP 4: THE APPLIANCES
We replaced the old hanging microwave with a sleek stainless hood vent. We also replaced the old white gas stove so it would match the vent. For now we will live with our white refrigerator and dishwasher since they are both in perfect working order. But one day our appliances will match 🙂
STEP 5: THE PENINSULA COUNTERTOP
It took 3 of us to finally tackle and complete this project! The butcher block sat in our garage for about a year before I finally decided it had to be done. Thanks to my father-in-law and husband, we finally did it! It took some creative brainstorming to get the cuts right, especially since using a table saw was a first for us. But fortunately it turned out! I won’t bother to write a tutorial about this project since we barely survived it once lol. But if you have questions, feel free to ask and I will answer as best as I can.
And that’s it! I will update any future projects as I complete them!
Here are the photos from start to finish:
[…] I will tell you this – plan to spend a LONG weekend at the very least. If you read my oak kitchen renovation post, you know my original plan was to use milk paint, sans primer. You also know, this didn’t […]