The quick kitchen remodel that wasn’t so quick after all

Once upon a time, we decided to do a “quick” kitchen makeover. You know, just slap some paint on the cabinets and throw up a backsplash, no big deal! Now, we look back and laugh and laugh and laugh at how naive we were. “Quick” has now turned into 5 1/2 weeks of not doing much. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

Here are a few of the listing photos of our kitchen:

And here it is a mere four hours after closing – progress!:

Look how happy I look here – so excited, so blissfully unaware of how long I’ll spend without kitchen cabinets:

We were able to get all of the doors down that night but since then, life has gotten in the way and we’ve only been able to work sporadically. It’s tough to muster up the energy and motivation to work on kitchen cabinets after you’ve both been working all day and we’ve spent far too much time at home improvement stores instead of at our own home on the weekends. One day after we had made a good bit of progress, we decided to step back and admire our hard work. That’s when we decided that we didn’t like the direction we were going in and all of the bottom cabinet bases would have to be re-painted. Womp, womp.

If you look really hard, you can see that originally we were going for a two toned look – the bottom cabinets and pantry were going to be a light blue and the tops were going to be white. We decided the shade of blue didn’t go well with the shade of gray we had on the walls and it wasn’t enough of a color difference to be the pop of color we were looking for. It just wasn’t coming together like the image we had in our heads:

We decided the best thing to do would be to go all white and as of today, our kitchen looks like this:

We still need to finish priming the insides of the cabinets, add a second coat to everything, and then prime and paint almost all of the doors and drawers (plus paint over the blue that’s still on the pantry). Unfortunately for us, Mother Nature has decided to be a bit moody this weekend and we’re worried that it’s a tad too cold to paint in the garage where all of the doors are currently living.

Hopefully we’ll be done soon and I can show you a good before and after! I think it already looks a hundred times better and the light cabinets make the space feel so much bigger.

So, have any of you tackled a project like this? Was the outcome worth all of the work and waiting?