Creating Through Life: Kitchen ReDo

I have been more than distracted lately. As you may have read previously we've been working on updating our kitchen. We bought a farmhouse complete with a farm kitchen, but it was just too dark and dirty.

We decided that New Years weekend would be a great time to begin since we had a few extra days off work. It felt like we barely even started that weekend. All it seemed like we did was peel endless amounts of wallpaper. Thank the Good Lord only half the kitchen was wallpapered. Removing wallpaper is such a mess!

The stuff below helped a lot with getting the remainder of the glue off.

I found myself coming home after work night after night refinishing cabinets until the wee hours of the night. On top of this redo I've been having health problems. I've been trying my best to stay positive and go on with life as normal but it's been tough. I've developed a large, complex ovarian cyst that has been causing a great deal of discomfort. I was referred to an Oncologist. I've been battling lots of emotions and thoughts. Thankfully I've not been alone in the battle. I'll be going in for surgery on the 31st. Even though this redo took a little longer than planned and it was LOTS of work. I'm so thankful we did it and we're pretty much done except for all the little details like artwork and such.

Can you believe these pictures?

Our goal was to brighten up the space. We're thrilled with the results! It's not like we have tons of experience with this kind of stuff, so we're pretty proud of our work.

The picture above is the eat in part of the kitchen, aka dinning room. I'm still in shock that the previous owners left us that 8ft solid wood farm table. I'll never forget the owner saying, "are you sure it's okay if we leave this table, I know it's probably not your style?" In that moment I held back a squeal of excitement. That table was love at first sight and I can't imagine the space with out it.

We saved a lot of money by keeping the appliances and counter tops the same. Refinishing the cabinets was such a roller coaster. It was a 4 step process that didn't start out looking that great. I was very nervous wondering what I would do if I didn't like it. I ended up refinishing all the cabinets because my husband said I had the "touch" and the finish needed to be consistent. I'm wondering if that was just an excuse? At least he did all the tall person stuff and actually put all the cabinets and new hardware back in place.

I chose to have 3 different drawer pulls from the rest, a spoon, fork & knife. I'm looking forward to someone asking where the forks are. Then I can direct them to the fork drawer!