Our Kitchen

Hey everyone!

Today we are talking about our kitchen! If you've been reading along you might have noticed that I'm slowly sharing with you each room of our house. Our kitchen is used daily and along with the living room is the place we spend the most time.

When we first moved in we immediately painted the cabinets and then bought new appliances. Here's what it currently looks like:

Our island is where we sit to eat all of our meals. There isn't room for a kitchen table in our house currently so we spend our meals at the counter. In our apartment we sat on the couch so at least this is a step up!

Eventually we would like to replace the countertops and floors. I could see us also redoing the entire kitchen if we decide to make this our forever home. For right now it works just fine but seeing a quartz countertop would be so nice :)

I love the appliances we picked. Tim was the person who actually pointed them out. I was so set on getting stainless steel but I never thought about the black stainless and I honestly like it better. It looks so good with the white cabinets. We have loved our LG appliances so far and I would definitely pick them again in a future home!

All of our KitchenAid supplies and other teal decor is my favorite! How nice would it all look with a grayish quartz countertop on both the regular counter and the island?!

This is the main door we come in and out every day. I really love how homey it feels. As many improvements as I can come up with, I love this being our first home! I know we will probably outgrow it someday and need to make a decision whether to add on or move but I do love coming through that door into our home every day. Especially when a little furry face greets me :)

What is your kitchen like? Do you have any big plans for it?

Kitchen Paint Touchups

In my ultimate house to do list post I shared that I wanted to get touchups done on the paint in the kitchen. Mostly on the cabinets next to the oven and the little areas above the cabinet where we had raised the cabinet up. I knew neither area needed to be super intensely painted but I just needed it to be the same color as the rest of the cabinets. 

When I moved the stove it was pretty gross underneath so I made sure to clean the floor while I was back there. 

It's amazing how things get gross so quickly! 

Sorry for the blurry picture but this the side of the cabinet where I needed to paint. 

Ptimed and ready for some paint!

So much better!

Like I said, it didn't need to be perfect. It just needed to be painted to match the rest of the kitchen and now it does! A lot of our projects are ones to get us buy until bigger redos in the future. I love our white cabinets, but someday we might completely redo our kitchen and that would probably involve all new cabinets. So this project is to hold us over until we can afford a full kitchen renovation. Or until we decide to move or add on one day. Who knows what will happen!

The cabinets look so much better with that small touch up! Now there's no more wood poking out!

Same on this side! Now Tim is just going to touch up the paint under the microwave and the kitchen will be pretty much all set!

What projects did you work on this past weekend?

Our New Kitchen Appliances

Hi loves!

Today I want to share our new kitchen appliances with you. When we moved into the house there were kitchen appliances but they were pretty old. We also wanted a bigger fridge and an updated dishwasher. We also wanted them all to match and I really wanted stainless steel. 

We ended up purchasing our fridge, microwave, stove and dishwasher at Home Depot and I love them!

We actually had to have a friend help Tim raise the cabinets up in order to fit the microwave and the fridge. It was just slightly too low for the fridge and the microwave would've been far too low. He also helped Tim install the microwave to the wall so a big thank you to Tony for helping!

Tim picked out the black stainless and I love it against our white cabinets. It definitely fits more with the look I prefer in a kitchen. I love all the room we have in our fridge and freezer- it feels so spacious after the small apartment one!

My number one love though??

This beautiful dishwasher. I have waited for so long to have a dishwasher and now it's finally here and I can wash all the dishes I want! Such a luxury when you go 3.5 years without one!

So what's next for the kitchen? Well we would like to replace the countertops with a quartz countertop on both the long counter and the island and I would love to install a big farmhouse sink in place of the one we have. Long term we will consider replacing the tile floor, installing crown molding above the cabinets and adding an addition on in order to have a pantry!

Nothing is an immediate need though and we are enjoying doing one project at a time and seeing this house become a home!

What projects do you have planned for your kitchen?

Painting Our Kitchen Cabinets

Good morning friends! We have officially been in our house for over a week and are loving every minute! We also added a new family member.... say hi to Sophie:

Sophie our goldendoodle came into our lives last Tuesday and is the best impulse purchase we've ever made! She is the sweetest girl and we have had the most fun this past week getting to know her. 

Anyways, back to the point of this post! We decided our first project in the new house was going to be to paint the kitchen cabinets. I really had my heart set on having white cabinets and Tim was more than game to get rid of the ugly wood color.

Here are some before pictures:

There was no hardware on the cabinets or drawers so no holes to fill which was great but we still had a ton of work to do!

We started by removing all the cabinet and drawer fronts. We created a label for each one to alphabetically connect it to the area where it needed to be reattached. This was great in concept but that system fell apart while painting. It wasn't hard to figure out where everything got reattached because our kitchen isn't huge, but if yours is you may want to work harder then we did to keep a system like this. 

Once everything was down we set up two painting stations; one on the kitchen island and one on a table in the living room. We both got to work priming all the doors, drawers and shelves, there were a LOT!

I think Tim wanted to kill me when I mentioned that I wanted to paint the inside of the cabinets as well. Once we started and I realized what a huge project it was, I decided to stop and not do the cabinets above the the microwave and fridge or the lower ones. The ones we will open all the time (plates, bowls, pantry, cups, etc) will be white but the rest will be unfinished inside.

I was mostly in charge of sanding, cleaning, priming and doing the first coat of paint. I left Tim take the lead on all final coats and putting the hardware on. Anyone else not as patient as your SO? Tim is so much more patient than I am and his painting always looks so much cleaner than mine. 

We spent a whole week getting this project done! It took us several nights after work and two full weekend days in order to get everything looking perfect.

It was truly a bigger job than we originally thought. We are certainly learning as we go around here!

We also took SO many trips to Home Depot to keep getting more supplies. Some of the things we found useful during this project were:

Plastic Drop Cloths  I would've preferred to get a more environmentally friendly drop cloth but we needed several of them since we were working in so many different areas while waiting for things to try. Having several of these plastic drop cloths that we could use and then toss was helpful for us.

Blue Painters Tape This came in handy for keeping our walls and appliances paint free!

Painters Tripods  These were a pain in the butt but helpful at the same time. We used them to hold up all the cabinets doors and shelves as we were painting so they wouldn't stick to the surface and we would be able to paint all the sides.

We also took down the microwave (I mean, Tim took down the microwave) so we would be able to get in and paint a little more closely. 

The night before we moved in when we left it looked like this! Everything was done and painted but just needed to be reattached. Tim was leaving work early on the day we moved so he could meet the Verizon Internet guy to connect our Wifi so he planned on attaching all the hardware and reattaching all the doors where they belonged. 

Ready for some afters??

I love it!!!

Lets do some side by side before and afters....

                        

  

                    

This is just the beginning!! We got our new appliances in this past Saturday and we plan on doing the counters at some point as well. So many projects, so little time!

I will share all about our new appliances soon!