My Life as Jill: Kitchen Facelift

Our kitchen is straight out of the 1950's.

This is what it looked like when Jimmy bought the house, and what it had looked like up until this past weekend.

Notice the wonderful tiled walls, vinyl flooring, and dark wood-grained cabinets. Oooh... ahhh...

If you look closely at the first picture you can see that the cabinet doors have vertical divots in them. Wonderfully dated.

Up until last weekend we've lived with it. It's a very functional kitchen... minus the dishwasher that doesn't work that we use as a drying rack. I started to think about what it would take to give our kitchen a facelift, and Jimmy agreed that we could do a little work and get big results. I wanted to start ASAP because after we bring our puppy home it would be a lot harder to tear apart the kitchen and keep him out of the work zone.

So here's the plan:

Fill all divots in the cabinet doors.
Remove tile on walls except for the wall behind the refrigerator/stove/sink.
Refinish those walls and small section above stove with new drywall.
Remove vinyl floors.
Lay new tile floor.
Paint cabinets and cabinet doors.
Paint walls.
Paint all woodwork to match cabinets.

All of the cabinets will be painted "Gull" by Martha Stewart.

Walls will be painted "Rainwater" by Martha Stewart.

My goal is to finish all this by August 6th, which is the day before we bring our puppy home.

For now we're keeping our countertops because they're in good condition. Maybe in the future we'll upgrade to granite or Silestone, but that may not happen before we're ready to move.

I've already completed filling in the divots in the cabinet doors. The first step was to test the process to see if it was possible. I did it with 4 coats of wood filler, and primed over it. It worked, but 4 coats of wood filler took too long because each layer would shrink. For the rest of the doors I first filled them with Bondo (which doesn't shrink but is a b**** to work with), sanded them down, then topped it with wood filler. 2 layers are better than 4!