all because I love my old house: A New Kitchen on a Budget

Wow, what a year! In between taking care of our two little girls and working on this kitchen, I don't really know where the time has gone! We moved into this beautiful old house two years ago. It needed a lot of work but we saw so much potential... Potential yes, but we have learned when you open up an old house, you open up a can of worms! After tearing out a 6 foot wide chimney (I don't suggest ever trying that) which was filled with soot and walled up with drywall, we reinforced with beams and fixed the last DIY homeowners mistakes. Then we were ready to make our kitchen look like a kitchen again.
This is what it looked like before and during the rather long journey of being the home owner of a 100+ year old house.

Looking into the kitchen from the very narrow doorway.
Who ever thought this was a good space for the fridge...


This is where I cooked for about a year.

Finally, we had saved up enough to buy some unfinished cabinets from a big box store. I think it cost a little over $1000.00 for all the cabinets.
It looked fairly easy to install. We just had to make sure it was all level. But Installing perfectly square cabinets on an old slanted wall can be challenging. My husband and I somehow managed to get it done in a few hours though with a little fudging here and there...

I decided this part needed a corner cabinet and building it from scratch was the cheapest route.


Almost ready to start the "finish work"

Since there were 11 inches left above the stacked cabinets, I decided to install a three piece build-up of crown molding.

As you can see, we have a crooked ceiling. Go figure.


The little space above some of the molding really bugged me, so I resorted to mudding the ceiling flat and caulking a bit.

It was Fall time and I needed to spray paint my cabinet doors in the basement before it got too cold.
I originally wanted to have white, glazed cabinets but finding the right shade out of the millions of whites to go with my old white appliances proved much tougher than I first realized. I ended up choosing Sherwin Williams "Snowbound" which didn't look "dirty" next to the appliances. Did I mention that there are a gazillion white paints to choose from?! Some day I will get stainless steel appliances...a girl can dream:)

My set-up in the basement. Worked great!

The best primer that I discovered works better than anything else is the BIN Shellac based primer. Love this stuff! It will keep the tannins in the wood from bleeding through. I also invested in a Wagner spray gun to paint the cabinets, and for $100 I'm so glad I did! I did about 5 coats including 2 coats of primer to get the coverage that I needed.

THE FINAL REVEAL:
I'm just about finished with this kitchen. I'm loving it and tired of it all at the same time. I'm just glad the hard part is over!

The Island Gray paint color is SW Classic French Gray

Found these saddle stools at Menards for under $60 total!

We installed two hurricane lanterns over the island. I found them on amazon as a Pottery Barn knock-off. I was told that the glass is very breakable so I haven't had the nerve to even clean it just yet. But I love them! The "Market Fresh" sign is one of my Re-Wood Designs. If you want one too, check out my Etsy store at www.rewoodesigns.etsy.com or if you are like me, make one yourself with stencils and paint.