Starting the Kitchen Renovation

Hi friends! Today I’m going to give you a glimpse into our current life. At New Years I decided to tackle a kitchen renovation (insert terrified remarks by my husband now). As you can see, there was nothing terribly wrong with our kitchen when we moved in. The cabinets had been updated at some point, the appliances were older but still functioning well, and we had granite countertops. These are our listing photos since I didn’t know I was starting a blog when I started the project 🙂

But, I couldn’t look past the pink-ish hue of the cabinets, the lack of a backsplash, the old and tired light, and the mismatched appliances. And, let’s not forget the giant hole in our ceiling that’s been there for over a year since we had a plumbing leak in our upstairs bathroom (something I 100% paid a professional to repair).

So, I scoured Pinterest to start getting ideas for cheap updates to the kitchen. I knew painting the cabinets was an option, but I also knew it was supposed to be much harder than just ‘painting the cabinets’. Luckily, I stumbled upon many blog posts that offered encouragement that I could, in fact, do this!

Timeline

Now before we dive into the details, a word about your timeline: This is not a weekend project. Let me repeat: This is not a weekend project. I knew it would take several weeks, but it takes MANY weeks, unless you can spend several hours during the day working only on this. And, during that time, your house will look like this:

And this:

And this:

I promise it’s worth the mess in the end, but I was definitely challenged by the mess and the clutter and not being able to use big portions of my house for a while. If you have a garage and can use it to store things or to put your cabinet doors in while painting, your house won’t be quite the disaster mine was. But, when you only have 400 square on each floor of your house, there’s not a whole lot of wiggle room to uproot a whole room of the house without a little bit of chaos 🙂

To give you an idea of the timeframes I’m talking about, here’s a breakdown of how long each item took me:

• Painting the cabinet frames: 1 week
• Painting the cabinet doors: 3 weeks
• Backsplash: 2 afternoons + 1 hour for caulking
• Painting the walls: 5 hours (including 3 hours of dry time between coats)
• Installing the new ceiling light: 30 minutes
• Hanging the pot racks and shelves: 1-2 hours
• Staining the bar top: TBD
• Replacing the Kitchen Faucet and removing the water filter: 3 hours + a call to our handyman and $120 for him to finish the project
• Replacing the appliances: 2 hours in Home Depot + 4 week wait for the backordered refrigerator and 2 hours for install
• Fixing the hole in our ceiling: 3 hours by a professional
• Painting the ceiling: 4 hours (including 2 hours of dry time between coats)
• Installing under the cabinet lights: 1-2 hours
• Installing a family command center: 1 hour

I haven’t finished the kitchen quite yet (hence, the TBDs), so I’ll update the rest of the timelines as I complete them!

Order of Events

Since each project had its own steps and challenges (and since I’m not quite finished yet), I’ve broken the steps up into their own posts. I installed the new light and completed the cabinets before I did anything else, but if I could do it all over again I would complete the kitchen mini-projects in the order below, to allow for less chance of messing up the cabinet paint when I painted the ceiling and walls:

• Fix the ceiling and paint it
• Install the new ceiling light
• Patch and paint the walls
• Paint the cabinet frames
• Paint the cabinet doors and install new hardware
• Install backsplash
• Hang new pot racks and shelves
• Install under the cabinet lights
• Install new faucet and removing the reverse osmosis filter
• Replace appliances
• Stain bar top
• Install a knife rack and spice racks
• Installing a family command center

Is It Worth It?

While this has been a ton of work so far, it’s 100% worth every bit of having our pots and pans in the dining room for a month and turning our basement into an obstacle course. I’m saying that just based on completing a few of these projects–I haven’t gotten to the rest, so it can only get better!

I love every inch of these new kitchen cabinets! And, I love it even more because I did most of it, even if there’s already a few scratches and one of the handles is a little crooked, it still looks sooo much better. And, I bet when it’s completely finished, I’ll love it even more (I’ll update the post with new pics once it’s completely done).

Did my POTS impact this project?

I haven’t talked about my POTS yet, but it’s such an integral part of why I really got invested in home projects, so I’m going to share a little with you. Did my POTS get in the way of completing this project? Absolutely! I can’t count how many times I had to lay down to relieve lightheadedness and sweating and nausea, or the number of times I had to stop sooner than I wanted to for the day because I was more exhausted than I should have been for the work I was doing.

Oh, is that frustrating! To mentally be ready and wanting to do something and have your body not cooperate. I’ve been a healthcare provider for ten years, but this is the first time I’m truly experiencing a life-altering illness, and let me tell you, it sucks. Like really, truly sucks.

But, with each hour I work on one of these projects, I take a little piece of myself back. Instead of feeling the overwhelming fear that things are only going to get worse and constantly worrying about what POTS is going to take from me next, I’m starting to accept that I may always have these challenging symptoms in my life, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fight back against the fear and work with my body to accomplish new things.

Next up–I’ll talk about prepping to get ready to refinish the kitchen cabinets. I can’t wait to share more with you all, and if you have any favorite tips or tricks for kitchen renovations, feel free to post in the comments below!

~Lauren

P.S. Since Sadie is missing from this post, here’s her saying hello!