The Cabinets From Hell

After a brief hiatus (you know...first week of school and all that) we were back at work this weekend.  We could put it off no longer: the kitchen.  One of the first things we did when we started work on the house was take all of the kitchen cabinet doors off of the frame.  And here we are...about a month later...and our kitchen looks like this:

Not exactly conducive to cooking meals.

We HAVE been working on it, it's just that the progress is hard to see.  We did manage to get all of the pulls on the drawers, which look absolutely lovely.

That was the easy part.  I have to say that everything else about redoing these kitchen cabinets has NOT been easy.  I don't think I fully realized how much work this would be when we started.  Which is probably a good thing.

I've set up shop in our little "workshop" down in the basement.  I've got lots of ideas on how to better organize this, but for now, it's functional.  The previous owners left behind a good-sized work table, which is fabulous.

See all of those paint cans?!?!

We have quite the collection.  I'm saving the empty ones for an idea that I have.

In our typical bending of gender roles, I've been the one doing all of the drilling on the cabinet doors down in the workshop.  Sean's taken more initiative on the painting projects.

Priming...goodbye, teal.

He even made a fun archaeological discovery in the kitchen, when he went to move the stove out of the way so he could prime behind it.

Peek-a-boo...

This is actually about ten times more hideous in person.  The faux brick is actually wallpaper.  You can sort of tell if you look closely at the picture that somebody scored it at one point, I assume planning to remove it. Maybe they got lazy and realized that it was hidden behind the oven?

The green stripe at the bottom is actually carpet.

What a kitchen that must have been.

Anyway, over the last few weeks I've been working on putting hinges and knobs on all of the doors.  Long story short, we thought we'd save ourselves some time by only filling the holes on the hinges that we wanted to switch.  If you remember, the old kitchen had all of the cabinets hung from the same direction.  It looked weird.  So, we switched the hinges to the other side on some doors.  Unfortunately, once I got to putting the hinges back on, I discovered that they were an absolute mess.  The new hinges fit the old holes, but whoever put the old hinges on apparently didn't own a measuring tape.  There was no consistency.  So, I ended up just redrilling most of the holes anyway.  Needless to say, it took much longer than planned.

We finally got those finished and today we started putting them back up on the cabinets.  It was a little tricky to figure out (the doors are heavy and the hinges don't like to lie flat), but voila:

They look pretty awesome.  Except for this pair, which was the first we put up.  A closer look:

These were measured out with the same guide using the same holes but they aren't even.  We decided they look like Judy Greer's nipples in Arrested Development ("Say goodbye to THESE, Michael!").

But the fun didn't end there.  We had measured carefully to make sure that after we moved the hinges, two sets would fit next to each other side by side.  Well...

Theory is not the same as reality.  Not gonna fit.  No way. 

(That's a screwdriver.)

So much for our good plan.  Of course, if we were smart we would have put the hinges on two doors that were next to each other and then hung them to make sure they fit BEFORE we put the hinges on all of the doors and drilled the holes for all of the knobs.

Now we're going to have to fill, sand, paint, and redrill about four doors.  They got put back in the workshop and I will deal with them next weekend.

However, we did manage to get MOST of the doors hung, minus the few that won't fit because of the hinges and a couple that are sticky and need sanding down.  The ones that are done look quite lovely.

Remember the old kitchen?

(It feels so good to look at these pictures every now and then.)

Of course, there's a few holes here and there, so right now it looks like this:

...but we're making steps in the right direction.  Now just imagine the above picture, but with all the doors...and no clutter...and minus the green countertops...and with tile flooring...

Oh, and we painted the far wall:

Ignore the dirty baking sheet...we made pizza.

I'm not sure what I think of the color yet.  We'll do a second coat tomorrow.  Thoughts?