Lake House Kitchen Redo - REVEAL

If you've been following along, you will know that Chablis and I have been hard at work repainting the kitchen at the lake house.  Get caught up here and here if you missed the progress posts.

Here's a couple quick pictures of what we started with - ugly 1970's wallpaper border and dark wooden cabinets.  The whole kitchen was dark and dingy. 

We removed all the cabinet doors and drawers.  Everything got scrubbed down with soft scrub and sanded.  Then everything got 3 coats of paint, with plenty of sanding between coats.  I did not paint the inside of any of the cabinets or drawers.  Everything was lightly distressed to give it a slight shabby chic look....

So here we are - the finished kitchen.  New white ceiling, taupe on the fascia where the wall paper border was and Windy Sea Breeze on the cabinets. 

We added that shelf over the stove.  Brilliant idea by Chablis!

We added a couple of new items for accents.  Chablis made the signs saying campfires and s'mores, fish fry and mess hall. 

I found this circa 1960's water skiing photo online and then bought a frame at an estate sale that I painted and distressed....

I found the vintage, red handled rolling pin at an estate sale for a dollar and I got the funny wooden fish cut out at an estate sale for a quarter....

I couldn't figure out why in the world anyone would make a wooden fish cut out that said finger fish on it.  But it was quirky and different so I decided to buy it.  Co-incidentally, it was the same estate sale where I bought the aforementioned picture frame.  When I was cleaning up the picture frame, the owners name was written on the back of the frame.  His last name was Finger   Honestly, you can't make these things up.  LOL!

I also picked up the rooster tray for cheap at a yard sale.  It's in mint condition.  I like the little pops of red in the kitchen.

We also whipped up this tin can utensil holder.  I did a post about that here if you're interested in how I made it.

And finally Chablis did a little stenciling for me.  Since the kids call me Bird, she stenciled a bird on one of the cabinets and another bird on one of the drawers.  Aren't they sweet?

And we had this huge side of the cabinet that faces the deck, so she stenciled that as well.  It looks cute when you're walking in from the back deck....

 

 

One more detail was the repurposed cutting boards I made.  I did a post about that here.

 

 

Honestly, I kept putting off starting this project.  I knew it was going to be a lot of work and time consuming.  If it wasn't for Chablis prodding me along, it probably still wouldn't be done.  But now that it's finished, I couldn't be happier.  Woo hoo!  The last thing I want to do is get the ancient TV off the counter.  We have a small flat screen TV at home that I want to bring down and hang on the end of the cabinet.  That will free up some more space on the counter too.

 

So, what do ya'll think?

 

Linking up with

 Craft Frenzy

My Repurposed Life

From the Farm Hop





Tin Can Utensil Holder

In between painting the cabinets in the kitchen, Chablis and I also worked on some new items to decorate the kitchen with as well.  I saw this tin can idea from a guest post over at A Repurposed Life and thought it was so cute.  I made mine a little differently, but it's basically the same thing.

I had made chili the night before, so I kept these 2 cans because I liked the size of them.  I washed them with some dish soap, let them dry overnight and then coated the outside of both cans with 2 coats of clear polycrylic....

I grabbed an old board out of the garage and painted it with a coat of white paint and then a coat of blue paint and gave it a light distressing after it dried.  I drilled a small hole in the top of the board and threaded some twine through it to hang it up.  And finally I used small zip screws to screw the cans onto the board.  I attached the screws from the inside of the cans onto the board and they were small enough that the screws don't stick out the back of the board.  Then I just hung it up on the end of one of the cabinets....

Cute huh?  Did you notice how I gave you just a little glimpse of my kitchen?  You have to come back tomorrow for the full reveal!

 

Yesterday I just happened to run across a post by the original blogger over at Knick of Time and I wanted to give credit where credit was due.  Go over and visit if you have time.

 

Linking up with:

Beyond the Picket Fence

Craft Dictator

My Repurposed Life

Funky Junk Interiors

Lake House Kitchen Re-Do Part 2

I'm continuing on from my post the other day about re-doing our lake house kitchen.  If you missed the first post, you can go back and read it here. 

The paint I used for the cabinets was Glidden High Endurance in the color Windy Sea Breeze.  It's a super pale sea foam green. I taped off the hardware on the cabinet doors instead of completely removing each hinge.  That saved a lot of time and if I got a little paint on some of the hardware it wasn't a big deal, because afterwards I just sanded all the hardware a little bit anyway. 

The day we started on the cabinets it was cold and raining outside, so we just spread plastic tarps on the counters and kitchen table and then painted all the doors inside the house.  All the doors and the outside of the cabinets needed 3 coats of paint.  I placed fans around the room to speed up the drying process between coats.

The backsplash behind the stove had a line where the original home owner had pieced the 2 laminate sheets together.  It always bugged me the way it looked.  Chablis suggested sticking a shelf in there.  Why didn't I ever think of that before??

We went out to the garage, found and cut down an old piece of wood, painted and distressed it and nailed it in place.  It worked perfectly!

It actually took us 4 whole days to completely remove, clean, sand, paint, distress and then re-install all the cabinets.  It helped that after the first day the sun came out and it warmed up, so we were able to move the tarps out onto the deck and paint the doors outside.  We were able to paint more doors at a time, plus the sun and wind helped to dry them quicker.  We also had to sand everything down before we started and then between the 2nd and 3rd coats of paint.  The whole process was very time consuming.

We let everything dry really good overnight, and then each morning Chablis would lightly distress everything we had done the day before.  We then re-hung the doors as we completed each section of the kitchen.  It was nice to see how it was coming along and it helped me to feel like we were making progress.

 

 

The next post will show the completed kitchen - please come back on Friday and take a look!

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!

Repurposed Oar

A couple of weeks ago we found this old wooden oar at an estate sale.   Chablis and I have been toying with sort of remodeling the kitchen in the Kentucky lake house.  I've been putting it off because it's going to be a lot of work, but we finally decided to just jump in and get going on it.  When I saw this oar sitting in a corner of a garage, I grabbed it and immediately knew that I'd repaint it and use it in the Kentucky kitchen.

Here's a few before pictures.  The former owners had written their names and some vacation dates on the back and they had drawn with magic marker on the front....

We painted and distressed the oar and then stenciled Mess Hall on it.  It reminds me of when I was a kid and went away to summer camp.  We called the dining room the "Mess Hall."   This will be the first thing I hang in the kitchen once we re-paint it.

We've begun work on the kitchen, so stay tuned for updates!