Kitchen Nightmare...I Mean Project

Okay, 'nightmare' is an exaggeration--but this endeavor definitely had some pot holes and speed bumps!  I started the kitchen project at the end of July and by September, I thought I would never have a complete kitchen again.  All I wanted to do was paint the walls a steel blue and the oak cabinets a crisp white to try to get away from the yellow tone that was taking over the kitchen.  The walls (and trim) were a breeze and I was loving how they turned out...and then I started the process of painting the cabinets.

I did a ton of research online and the only thing I found was that there were a zillion and one ways you could paint your cabinets.  I was getting a little frustrated/overwhelmed at which approach would be the right one for me...but I finally decided how I was going to do it and had to tell myself to not look back.

It was a lot of time-consuming work, early mornings, and it took patience to deal with a crazy kitchen in some of the interim stages...but it was all coming together beautifully.  Or so I thought. 

While I primed and painted the cabinet boxes and drawers, everything in the drawers had to be on the counter...it was slightly crazy!

Such a relief to get the drawers done and installed!

After a month of cleaning, stripping, priming, and painting, it was finally time to put the cabinets back on their hinges but to my horror none of the inset doors were fitting in their openings!  Not one!  So I did what any respectable girl would do in this situation: I called my Dad...crying.  He talked through the problem via video chat and gave me the idea to chisel some of the door away so the hinge would be shifted over enough to give the needed space for the door to clear.  I got my tools and mustered up the courage to try it...but for some reason it still didn't work.  Dad then recommended the best solution would be to trim the inset part of the door (which would mean repainting that area as well).  I didn't want to make Mom and Dad drive all this way to fix my problem, so I asked a carpenter in our ward to do the work.  He agreed...but I kept waiting to be put on the schedule and it wasn't happening.  When I approached him about it again he had obviously forgotten.  Mom and Dad looked at their calendar and figured out a time when they could come mid-October, but then at the end of September the carpenter called me up and said he had a cancellation and was able to squeeze me in that next day.  He cut everything Friday morning, I primed that afternoon and painted that evening so by the weekend, the cabinets were up (and almost all of them work) and I felt so relieved.  There are still things I need Dad's help with, but in the meantime, I'm extremely happy to have this work done AND that I absolutely love how it turned out!

I love how the new curtains turned out and the pendant light LOOKS great...but can't get it to work, ha ha!