Michael & I have different days off during the week. I work a normal mon-fri 9-5, get the weekends off. Michael works longer days 4 days a week and gets 3 days off, and his schedule changes every quarter. Right now the only day we have off together is Saturday, so Saturdays tend to be the days that we work on the house.
Yesterday, Michael and his
father set out on the mission to finish our kitchen cabinets. Here is what the Kitchen looked like when we bought the ho
use, this picture I took right of the MLS Listing.
It's like I said before, the house was last updated probably in the 1970's. Other than being dated, the kitchen is in fine working order and has a nice layout. Of course money plays into things as well, we are first time home owners and live on a budget so a big $50k kitchen renovation just isn't an option for us. The cabinets while dated are very well made, so we decided to just reface them all and change the hardware.
Michael has a cousin who is very handy, and lives in a house that had pretty much the same kitchen as what we have. Michael's Cousin's kitchen is the inspiration for our kitchen, we took their ideas and made it fit our wants & needs.
The first thing Michael & his dad does is take all the doors off & and hardware off and sand them down to create a smooth surface to work with.
Part of refacing these cabinets is trying to make them look like cabinets that are more current, and a little less flat. To do this we picked out some moulding from Home Depot. It's a very inexpensive way to update the look of your cabinets, not just painting them and having the same flat cabinets just in a different color.
Michael is very good with tools and measuring and making sure everything fits perfect. His rule is to measure twice, cut once. This really cuts down on mistakes and therefore wasted moulding.
So once all the moulding is cut Michael both glues & nails it into the cabinets, in the picture below you can see all his notes and measurements that he writes in pencil directly onto the door. he also labels the door so we know where it goes, because EVERY SINGLE DOOR is a different size, which certainly makes things, shall we say...interesting?
Once this is done, michael fills in the holes with wood putty and then they are ready to be primed and painted! We use all Benjamin Moore Paints & Primers, we really feel they are top quality. For anything that was previously stained we use a product called Fresh Start Primer, and we use two coats of both the primer and the paint. So..the goal was to finish yesterday but things take time and primer needs to dry, so everthing did get moulding and two coats of primer. So all we need to do now is paint, and that can get done after work during the week and be done by next weekend! Here are the cabinets with two coats of primer, it'll give you a general idea of what they look like.
So, you're wondering what I was doing while all of this was going on? Well after two whole weeks of rain, with very little sunshine in between the weeds in our garden have taken on a life of their own, and I was trying to do what I can to get rid of them. I was using this great tool called a shuffle or action hoe in the vegetable garden, this digs up some weeds from the roots and others it just cuts them off at the roots, but it sure does take a lot less time than going in and picking them by hand. I got about 3/4 of the way through the vegetable garden, and will finish that up today. While I was doing that though, I did harvest some Spinach and Strawberries. I think I'll take some of our rhubarb and make a strawberry rhubarb pie later today, and i'll find something to make for dinner with the spinach! It's so exciting to be eating from our own garden for the first time this year!
Kristen
