We last left you (hopefully) in suspense of what happens next in our kitchen! But man what a crazy busy summer we’ve had (hence the 6 month fall-out on the blog). Between house projects, visiting friends and family in Iowa, selling baked goods at the NE farmer’s market and both acquiring new jobs, we just couldn’t find time to make our blog a priority.

But we’re BACK!!! And I really want to kick things off right where we left last time.

Kitchen work in progress part two!

After we got that wall down, we decided we needed to do something with the back doorway trim. With layers and layers of paint we had two options. 1. Take it down and start over, or 2. strip it. At this point in the project, we were a little limited by the amount of tools we had on hand. Plus, we figured because the house was old and had settled it’d be easier to just strip the paint and work with what we had.  So we opted for stripping it.

Stripping paint is overrated. Seriously, it’s shitty work that always takes longer than you’d expect. Not only were we dealing with some pretty dangerous chemicals, we found ourselves repeating the process at least 4 times from so much paint build up. By the time we bought a gallon of stripper and put all the labor into it, it would have been cheaper just to start from scratch. Lesson learned.

After the woodwork was finished, we pulled everything behind the cabinets down to studs and painted the upper cabinets white. If you’ve ever done a kitchen remodel before you know at this point it’s HUSTLE MODE.  So, we both took a few days off work and spent the next 5 days getting everything ready for our plumber and electrician.

Cabinet prep

The black lower cabinets we talked about in our last post would go back exactly where they were. First we needed to rehang the uppers to their proper height from the lower cabinets. We also built a little bulkhead above the uppers. This would create a seamless transition between the white cabinets and the ceiling. Now that the wall was down, we decided to utilize the extra space and wrap the countertops to create a little seating area.  This also gave us an extra cabinet for storage space!

After hanging drywall and getting the cabinets back in place the next step was to finish mudding in preparation for tile and countertops. Things were going so smoothly at this point we’d projected to have our kitchen finished in less than a few weeks. All that was left were countertops, plumbing, electrical and some flooring. Easy right?

In our next post we’ll share one of our first big mistakes! Stay tuned.