Kitchen Part II

In the hopes of making myself feel more accomplished, I decided that I needed to write about the kitchen update. I previously wrote about the cabinet boxes that are complete, are currently crying out to be dressed with some doors. Sadly, I must say that the door situation has been very tedious. Going into this project, I truly thought that we would be able to complete it in a weekend. I had read on other blogs how their kitchen redo took two weeks or five weekends, depending on when you are working on it. I thought this was a ridiculous timeline. I quickly came to realize differently!

After we took the doors off the cabinet boxes, I had a debate with my mom about taking the trim off the doors. I didn't get a picture of a cabinet door by itself, but you might be able to see in this picture.

It looked extremely outdated and I wanted something more modern. I wanted them to look like newer cabinets but without the new cabinet price tag. Let's face it; we're a newly married couple, and our bank accounts reflect that.

Anyway, as my mom and I are debating about taking the molding off and how hard it would be, I look over and Brandon effectively ends the debate when he starts taking the molding off with a screwdriver and a hammer. Well ... I guess that solved our problem. I'm actually really glad he did it, because I don't believe I would have liked the doors so much with the molding.

You can easily see in this picture what the shape was before it came off. Now the problem was that I had lots of wood scraps and little holes left in the doors. I had to scrape off the chipped wood and fill the holes.

 I used a putty knife to fill in the larger holes made by the hardware and I just used my finger to fill in the holes left by the finishing nails that held the molding to the doors.

 Then it was time to break out the big guns. By this, I mean Brandon! Yep, Brandon got to get his sanding on. I could almost see the excited on his face.

Sorry for the craptastic picture, but iPhone at night = awful!!

 You can also tell that he had to put a little more effort where the molding used to be. At the time, we thought we might have to leave them flat faced for a while before we got trim of some sort to make it look a little more modern.

Once Brandon finished sanding (and yes, I did my fair share of sanding too!!), it was time for the tack cloth and then on to priming. Yay! I am currently in the process of trying to finish priming those doors. I calculated earlier, and it takes me about 2 minutes per door. I can only do 22 doors at a time, and this is a two coat household. Needless to say, this is taking FOREVER. Okay, not really, but I am soo ready to have my kitchen in true working order. But, I keep remembering how much work is going into this and how much I already love it and it's not even complete.

Day 1 

at Door Priming Central

Day 2

at Door Priming Central

If you can't tell the difference, for shame! Day 1 I did a double coat on the back of half and one coat on the back of the other half. Day 2 I did a second coat on the half that didn't get two the day before, and then I got one coat on the front of the other half. I don't know if you can see the outline of the molding in this picture, but here's a close up. 

If you're wondering about whether or not we have trim for the cabinets, well, I won't make you hold your breath ... we do! We actually got it for $6 for every 12 ft. piece (it was originally $7 but since we were buying so much, the manager gave us a deal). Here's how we figured out how much we needed.Brandon roughly measure the cabinet boxes.

 I would then write down the numbers he gave me, and then I used my math teacher powers (even though I teach English now, I can still do simple math!! Most of the time.) And here is what my super technical math looked like.

So we figured we would need 30 pieces if they were 10 ft. pieces. They were 12 ft. pieces, so we got 25. Then Brandon got to cutting.

Trim cut for the cabinets so far.

The pile of trim left to cut.

So even though we still have several days to go until our kitchen cabinets are complete, I am very happy about our progress. This project is teaching me to have patience. I am not Flash; I can't get everything done super quick. Real life doesn't work as fast as my brain can come up with ideas. Which is lucky I guess, because not all ideas that come to my mind are worthy of being brought to life (this reminds me of my kitchen island). Hopefully my next kitchen update will be with the kitchen complete.