The Cabinet Fiasco

I never imagined it would take so long to get "after" pictures of our kitchen. Everything except our cabinets has been done for a while now. We thought the cabinets would be done and hung (and they were, sort of) this past weekend. But now we are back to square one.

We had wanted to glaze our cabinets with a somewhat dark color so that they weren't so white in contrast to our new faucet, knobs, and light fixture which are all an oil-rubbed bronze finish. We really just wanted the glaze to show up in the edges and decorative inset in the cabinet doors. The lady we hired to do the glazing turned out to be a nightmare. She put the glaze on way too thick over the entire cabinets and on top of that they were very smudged and not professional looking. We thought it was bad and Brett talked to her about making them lighter but she really didn't follow through. He had even showed her pictures as examples of what we wanted before she started. I thought that maybe once we got them all hung and the hardware on they wouldn't look so bad so Brett's poor dad got them all up last weekend. Unfortunately that didn't really help and even our realtor came over and said that we would have to change them.

I meant to take pictures before we took the doors back off but Brett was too fast for me. Here you can sort of see them in the background. They look a lot darker in person and there are a lot of smudges, lines, and imperfections.

So now we are having this same lady come back tomorrow and Friday to get rid of this disaster. She is going to paint them back to the original color. We will only have to pay her the second half of her fee if we approve of the job she does. I am really hoping it isn't sloppy but I don't have a great feeling about it. We just want to get this done so we can get the house on the market next week!

Updating the Kitchen - Before

Since we are putting our house on the market, we decided to update our kitchen. It wasn't awful like it hadn't been updated since the '70's when the house was built. But it definitely needed some updating. Here are some "before" pictures. This is basically what it looked like when we moved in except that we changed out the shiny brass knobs with satin nickel (which have since been removed and sold) and replaced the light fixture above the sink (it was groovy, baby).

So far we have removed the cabinet knobs, wallpaper, window treatment, and tile backsplash. We also replaced the countertop with a different laminate one that wasn't so white. We got a new sink made of composite granite, and also got a new faucet in an oil rubbed bronze finish.

We are going to have a new tile backsplash installed this week and will also have the walls painted. We are trying to find someone to touch up and glaze the cabinets to give them more of an antique look. And we purchased some oil rubbed bronze knobs to match the new faucet. Hopefully we can get someone in to do the cabinets and then I can get some "after" pictures up.

Oh, and sorry about all the stuff on the counter. That's a normal look for our kitchen but will obviously not be when we are showing the house. I have already cleaned out my cabinets so the toaster, toaster oven, magic bullet knockoff, and teapot are put away and out of sight. A lot of the other stuff pictured was just out due to us using it that day so our counters will be very clutter-free for the showings.