Kitchen Cabinet Makeover

We are continuing with the kitchen makeover. We had emptied the cabinets so we could paint the insides and we gave the outside of the cabinets a fresh coat of white paint, too. Once the paint had completely dried we covered the cabinets in order to paint the countertops. The countertop makeover was shown in an earlier post - Painted Kitchen Countertops.

The pictures are a little cluttered with things we have removed; but you can see what we have started with.

The range will remain with the house (we are getting it ready to sell), and this drawer with the missing front won't open more than a few inches before catching on the range. We will fix that issue by making the drawer narrower; a little storage will be lost but it will at least open.

Along this wall is the refrigerator and an unusual cabinet area that we have decided to make a baking center. Above is a cut out that will be the new location of the microwave.

The cabinets are original to the home. Plain wood with no trim or decoration at all. The backsplash is some sort of thin wallboard that has also been painted. I do like this soft sage color - but ONLY on the walls!

The back side of the bar area also has doors which are totally unnecessary. The lower cabinets can easily be accessed from the kitchen side. We are going to remove the large doors and cover the area with a single finish.

The smaller door at the end we will leave since it allows access to a corner cabinet that can't be reached from the kitchen.

The kitchen is open to the family dining area and it has a nice flow. The double windows are nice but need a simple and breezy window treatment.

The side wall has plenty of room for a stand-alone pantry and there is plenty of depth in the area so a pantry won't clog up the flow.

Again, there was not a large budget for the kitchen makeover. We decided to use beadboard and a small trim to outline it. We also decided to keep it all white and use a latex enamel for better wear.

This was the model we tried. We really liked the way it turned out and it would save a lot of money by covering only the center section of the doors with beadboard. The trim is a small, flat screen molding.

Since we liked the look of the beadboard on the cabinets -we got to work! There seemed to be a lot of cabinets once we got started; but the results were fantastic.

We found a little wooden trim piece and nailed it to the front of the sink area then painted.

We liked the beadboard so much that we decided to put it on the dining room side of the lower bar area. It covered the place where we removed the two large doors and gave the whole area a clean, cohesive look.

We didn't use beadboard on the drawer fronts since it would have been very narrow. However, we did use the screen molding to give them a fresh look, too. We found inexpensive new door/drawer knobs in a simple design to go with the new look.

We now had to decide on the backsplash. And we will save that for tomorrow and show you the completed kitchen!