We believe this was re-done by the former owner in the 1960s. Turns out that Betty Draper's kitchen in Mad Men is almost identical.
No, really. Look at those drawer pulls. The same!
I know Mad Men decorating is all the rage at the moment, but we weren't really feeling the love with this kitchen. So this was actually our very first DIY project, started before we moved in.
We had already set aside a chunk o' change to completely gut-renovate the master bath, so the kitchen face lift had to be done on the cheap. I'm not in love with the layout of the cabinets, but for now we are leaving the bones and just changing the aesthetics. This phase was: (1) sanding & repainting the cabinets and updating the hardware; (2) stripping the wallpaper and painting the walls; and (3) replacing the decades-old appliances.
The first step was pretty gross: removing all the cabinet doors and drawers and cleaning off the decades of accumulated kitchen grease. For that we had to use TSP. Then Steve bought a power-sander (one of his first power-tools, but certainly not his last) and sanded every door, drawer-front and the fronts of all the cabinets. Even after we had scrubbed with TSP, his sandpaper got pretty gummy with leftover grease. He went through a lot of sandpaper.
Once sanding was finished, he patched the holes in the cabinet doors where the old hardware had been drilled, primed and painted the cabinet doors & fronts Behr's "Spice Delight" in semi-gloss, and installed new hardware.
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Meanwhile, I was using wallpaper remover to strip off the green floral wallpaper in huge swaths, trying not to take any of the wall with me as I went. When we were down to plaster, we patched up the big holes and repainted. The color of the walls is Behr's "Straw Hat."
We also found tall free-standing Ikea cabinets that are so close to the rest of the kitchen color that they look like built-ins, and sit at the end of our breakfast nook without blocking the radiator or back window.
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Despite our best efforts at patching, the walls were in pretty bad shape, so we installed wide crown-molding to hide some of the worst sins. We also repainted the bottom molding, window frames and sills a glossy white, cleaning up the whole look.
We ordered this in-wall spice cabinet, custom made and pre-painted in the Spice Delight color, and Steve cut a hole in the wall and installed the cabinet. (He even trimmed the light-switch cover to fit between the cabinet and the door frame!) Instant additional storage!
Finally, we bought new stainless steel appliances: a fridge and a dishwasher. (The old oven was in okay shape.) So now we don't have a dishwasher that sounds like a 747 taking off in our kitchen every time we run it, so there's that.
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When the Sears guys were hauling away our old, army-green fridge, Steve peeked at the back and the sticker said 1975 -- so it was older than we are. Felt a bit disrespectful just sending it to the dump, but...
The biggest cost of this phase of the kitchen project was the new appliances. Other than that, it was a few hundred bucks for the custom-built spice cabinet and Ikea standing cabinets, another couple hundred bucks for the crown molding installation, and aside from that... just the cost of TSP, drawer/cabinet hardware, and paint. The rest was good old fashioned sweat equity!
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The next phase is to replace the old, stained and chipped laminate countertop and backsplash. Finally, we will have someone come in to rip up and replace the floor, which is peeling up at the corners of the room, and torn and stained in other places where we have strategically placed rugs for now.
Stay tuned!
