Kitchen Cabinets Refresh

If you’ve been following along in my Instagram Stories, then you know that we’ve had painters here for the last week updating our kitchen!  They turned out truly perfect and I love them even more than I thought I would.  And y’all, I thought I’d love them a lot so that’s really saying something.  :o)

After B and I got married I moved into his teeny 1,200 square foot bachelor pad where we lived happily for the first couple of years of our marriage.  He had bought a fixer-upper when we first started dating, and together we had completely transformed the whole house complete with the happiest yellow kitchen with freshly painted bright white cabinets… all painted by yours truly.  Oh, and Brian, too.  ;o) 

However, B and I both knew that having babies in that house was out of the question.  We were already bursting at the seams with just the two of us, and with only one bathroom, no closet space, and an outdoor laundry room we knew we didn’t want to stay there long-term.  So we said goodbye to our beloved first house together, and we decided to move on to something roomier and with more closet space.  It was bittersweet for sure.

We looked at houses on the market here in town for weeks and there was always, always something lacking.  I knew exactly what I wanted (and I’m a control freak), so since we couldn’t find exactly that, we decided to build.  The building process was surprisingly easy and smooth, and I loved every second of picking out upgrades and paint colors and floor finishes and pulls.  Going in, I had my heart set on another bright white kitchen, but when we attended our first design meeting I fell head over heels for the allure of the trendy Red Mahogany cabinets that our builder so highly recommended. 

Sigh.

Upon building I thought it was the prettiest kitchen I’d ever seen, but it only took about a year or so for me to realize that we had made a very expensive mistake.  Not only did they stain the outsides of the cabinets, but they had stained the insides dark as well, and I could barely see their contents because everything was swallowed up in a dark abyss.  (Dramatic, no?)  I knew we’d have to live with them for a while, so I added it to my long-term to do list to have them painted and I moved on. 

And before I go any further, I’m not saying that I don’t love dark cabinets, but I will say that they drastically darken the entire first level of our home since we have an open floor plan.  Plus, THEY SHOW EVERY SPECK OF DIRT AND SPILLS.  Oh my gosh, I learned that lesson the hard way.  I’m still dealing with this mistake in my black on black SUV.  Sigh.  Since we also went with the trendy dark Spokane Merlot hardwood floors (which I still love, but also hate because – ALWAYS LOOK DIRTY), it was the darkest kitchen ever. 

When 2015 rolled around we decided to add on to the back of the house, and the minute that porch roof was extended across the back of the house we lost every precious ounce of daylight in our living room and kitchen, which basically turned our entire downstairs area into a dungeon.  It was then that my tolerance for the dark cabinets turned to pure hatred.    

After eight years of tolerating/hating them I finally convinced Brian to have them painted.  ;o) 

We are no strangers to painting… believe me, I’ve painted plenty of walls and ceilings and cabinets and pieces of furniture in my day, but after painting our cabinets in our old house I swore I’d never paint cabinets again.  It was SUCH A PAIN.  Not to mention everything in the cabinets stuck to the paint for months afterward.  Sigh. 

So anyway, once B granted my wish, I did a bunch of research on local painters and we ultimately decided on one of the more popular companies in town to do ours since they had the best (and most) reviews. 

We booked them back in December and they were so busy that the earliest they could book us was for the first week of February.  I waited (kind of) patiently for several more weeks and they finally arrived last week to get started.  They worked all last Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and a little bit Monday (for some touch-ups) and they drastically transformed our entire downstairs.  I am completely OBSESSED with the kitchen again and it finally looks like the kitchen I had dreamed of all along. 

We went with PPG Delicate White paint (PPG 1001-1) and it is absolutely perfect for this room.  For you Sherwin-Williams fans, it's comparable to SW Pure White (SW 7005).  I knew I wanted a bright, true white, but I also didn’t want the room to look cold and sterile.  Delicate White is a pale, true white but not stark white.  It has an LRV (light reflectance value) of 88 which means it is reflects a lot of light which is exactly what we needed for our dark dungeon kitchen.  

Also, there is barely any color added in to the paint (only one tiny drop of black, if I remember correctly), which means that we don’t have to worry about any weird gray or green or yellow or blue undertones popping up like in so many other white paint colors.  Since it has no undertones, it basically goes with everything.  Our kitchen faces south, so we have a lot of warm afternoon light that comes in, especially during the winter months, and that helps warm the white up a little, but not too much.  

Okay, enough with the chit-chat… I know you’re just here to see the befores and afters so let’s do this thing!

Here is the kitchen before the refresh:

Here is the kitchen after Day 1 of the refresh:

And here is the kitchen in natural light after the refresh (and please excuse the photo quality... they are kind of grainy because it's been raining for 40 days and 40 nights here and we haven't seen the sun in forever):

And with the lights on:

And finally, a side-by-side comparison:

ALL. THE. HEART. EYES. Y'ALL.

Since the insides of the cabinets had been stained dark, we had to have them painted as well, and I cannot even believe how much cleaner everything looks.  Our painters spray everything, so they have a super sleek and professional finish unlike the brush-painted look.  I could not be more in love.  And for an added bonus... it made me fall in love with our floors all over again!!  They look AMAZING next to the white cabinets.

I will say that I was slightly worried about how the white paint would look with our granite countertops, but it looks fantastic.  We have the Giallo Santa Cecilia Light Granite, which has flecks of white in it, so it ended up being a seamless transition.  

Eventually I would love to add a white subway tile backsplash as well, but that’s not in our budget right now so it will have to wait.  In the meantime, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy being able to see everything in my cabinets for the first time in ten years.  ;o)  Just look at the difference:

Before:

After:

Amazing, isn't it?  It's like I have all new pots and pans!  Everything just looks so much cleaner and shinier!!

Well that was long-winded for a post about kitchen cabinet painting, but I’m just so darn excited I could blab about them forever.  Just ask Brian.  :o)    

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