Kitchen: Phase 1 - Complete?

Our goal this week was to really focus on finishing our kitchen so that we can completely unpack and put away everything and finally be able to cook a full meal without scavenging through boxes looking for utensils and gadgets!

First, after getting the kitchen sink installed, I had to re-sand, patch and repaint the cabinet below it. We reused the piece of wood that ran along the top of the cabinet in that section and moved it down to makeup for the giant hole that the false drawer used to take up.

Next, James and I worked on putting up the crown molding that we got to transition from the ceiling to the upper cabinets. I wanted a more seamless look and we found a thin molding that worked perfect. This was a daunting task since we have a corner cabinet that is at a weird angle (56 degrees) and we didn't necessarily know the best way to get the correct angles in the molding. I wish I had counted how many cuts we had to make to get the right angles, because it was A LOT! Eventually, though, we got close enough with all the cuts and amazingly, we had bought the perfect amount of molding to make up for all of our mistakes. With those cut, James nailed them up with the nail gun and I filled in any gaps with spackle. 

One corner spackled, obviously there is some sanding and smoothing out to be done.

Molding on, still waiting to be painted

The molding turned out nice, it looked way better than before! But the above picture brings me to another project. After getting our upper cabinet up and the doors on, I realized that I couldn't live with myself if I just left that dingy color on the base of the cabinets. Finally, I just decided to take off the doors and repaint everything with a fresh coat of white. Yes, I will have to re-wax and yes, it's going to take some time but after I got that coat on, I was so glad I did it. With this coat, the grease stains finally aren't coming through anymore... after all, there are now three layers of wax between them and the fresh, new paint. Below is a picture showing the difference, before and after (before is the horizontal piece, after is the vertical)...

It may not seem very obvious in the photo, but trust me, there is a significant difference! Anyway, I can't wait to paint the molding and get a few coats of wax on so that we can put the doors back one, they're going to look great with these few extra touches that we added!

Next up, finishing the lower cabinets... I give my dad credit for putting the hardware on all of the doors and drawers. The hardware also wasn't an easy task... we had 3" hardware with a 3-1/2" existing hole spread, so it took some finesse to get them right... but afterwards, they all turned out great!

So that's it for the kitchen... you may have noticed that I haven't posted many "finished" photos... in the next week or so I'm going to post the "after" pictures of all of the projects that we have been working on in there, I just wanted everything to be done and cleaned up so that I can get some nice shots. At that point, the kitchen still wont be completely done by any means, we still have open shelving and back splash to install (both of which are pretty big projects), but it will be totally "functioning", meaning I can put everything away, use our cupboards and drawers and actually set things on our counter top!

We did finish one other project outside of the kitchen though and that was installing shelving in our bedroom closet. We ended up using the pre-made shelving board available at Home Depot and stuck with a pretty basic design. We did one shelf up high for storing out of season clothes, a stack of shelves on either side for each of us and two rods for hanging. The pre-made shelving was pretty cool because they already had pre-drilled holes for pegs, which made making the actual shelves super easy.

First we ripped out the boards that were running horizontally along our walls...

Then we did all the necessary cutting and put in the two side shelves and the top shelf...

And finally, we installed the rods...

I filled the holes in the wall that ripping out that board left, and the next step was supposed to be painting the strip but somehow I totally spaced and didn't even think about painting before I started putting all of our clothes away... one day :)

The finished product turned out pretty good for how affordable the materials were and I think overall, it only took us about an hour and a half to completely put together! We plan on doing the same thing for the two other closets...

Here is the BEFORE

And here is the AFTER!

So that's it for this week, but I really am looking forward to putting the finishing touches on the kitchen and sharing everything soon! Also, the husband promised me a trip to big city this weekend to so some furniture shopping,and by that, I mean the Sacramento IKEA haha! Really though, I've been searching for the right shelving/storage solution for our bathroom and I can always find something at IKEA! With that said, I really hope that I can tidy up our bathroom situation as well and get that space looking nice enough to share a "finished" post for too.

Special thanks this week to my dad and Teresa for helping us get to the finish line with our kitchen!