Lake House Kitchen Re-Do Part 1

I've been waiting   putting off painting the lake house kitchen since we bought this place eight years ago.  I just hated the dark cabinets and really tacky wallpaper trim.  Every spring we'd open the house and I'd say that this was the year we'd paint the kitchen and every fall we'd close up the house and it still hadn't been done.  It was one of those projects that needed to be done, but it's hard to do that sort of thing when the fish are biting or friends are visiting or I just plain didn't have the energy for it.

This year we started off with a bang and repainted the back hallway.  Chablis kept prodding me to just move on to the kitchen and get it over with.  In a moment of weakness I relented and agreed to at least paint the ceiling and pull down the trim and paint the fascia over the cabinets.  But when we tried to tear down the wallpaper, I discovered that it must have been applied with the strongest wallpaper glue ever invented, because it would not budge.  We were not off to a good start and I wasn't happy about it.  So we moved on to plan B -isn't there always a plan B?? - just paint over the damn wallpaper!

 First we repainted the ceiling with 2 coats of white.  I even removed the blades on the ceiling fan and gave them a much needed washing. 

Then Chablis started to paint the trim and fascia.  With both of us working, it didn't take long to paint everything.  It looks better already, don't you think?

I could already see what a difference the lighter paint was going to make and I got a little more motivated to start on the cabinets.  The next thing we did was start removing the cabinet doors.  This was probably the most time consuming thing and took both of us because the doors are heavy and it was hard to hold the door up and use the electric drill at the same time.

Once all the doors and drawers were removed, we had to wash them down.  The cabinet doors were grungy and caked with years of kitchen grease.  I tried a couple of different products to clean them up, but discovered that soft scrub and dawn dish soap applied with a kitchen scrubby worked the best. 

 

Once they were cleaned I set them outside on the deck to dry in the sun and we attacked the cabinets.  I figured it was a good time to clean them all out, get rid of stuff we didn't use anymore and then wipe them all down inside.  I kept going back and forth, trying to decide if I wanted to paint the inside of the cabinets too.  I'll be honest with you - laziness won out.  These cabinets are huge and deep.  I would have had to literally crawl inside to paint the backs of some of them.  That made my decision in the end - wash the insides down and forget about painting the interiors.  And I'll tell you something - in the end, I was glad that was what we did.  They look fine.

 

Come back for the next post to see the painting transformation!