Most of my readers are friends and family, so as you know we bought a house last year that is a total wreck and we have been working very hard to fix it up. Seeing as we spend almost every dime we make on the mortgage, we have little left over for home improvement projects. Every few months we manage to scrape together enough to fix something, and this month, with the help of mommy working 15-25 hours of overtime for the last couple weeks, we are fixing up the kitchen a little.
By a little I mean we are painting the cabinets and installing new hardware, removing one cabinet and replacing it with an island, and installing a new floor. So far I have sanded, primed, painted and installed hardware on all but four cabinet doors, and I mean to finish them by tomorrow evening. Tomorrow after work I also need to do some touch-up painting, because no matter how careful you are or how thoroughly you cover something with paint you always miss something.
I have been working on these cabinets for 8-10 hours a day since Wednesday, which includes all of the above-mentioned tasks as well as the hours spent driving around looking for decent hardware on clearance and searching for hinges that matched the size/shape of our current hinges. The main thing we thought about was price, of course, but I shopped around WAY more than I usually do and I found some nice knobs and handles for a decent price; after all, it gets really expensive to buy 36 knobs/handles at $2-3 each. I looked around for an entire day and finally found some that were just over $1 each; they are stainless, and I do not have anything stainless in my kitchen, but they look nice with the paint regardless.
The hinges were a completely different story! The hinges that fit our cabinets do not exist ANYWHERE, except for one tiny hardware store in Auburn. For some reason stores do not carry hinges for 1950's style cabinets. All the salespeople kept asking me why I just did not get new doors with the invisible hinges, as they were more in style, etc.
Ya, cuz I never thought of just getting entirely new doors, ever. Why didn't I think of that?
I finally found a pretty close match, but even they are not perfect, so I have had to do some manipulating (forcing) to make them work. I have some fine tuning to do, but after hours of adjusting and re-adjusting, I only have 2 squeaky doors. Daddy is a little upset because all the doors worked fine before Mommy got to them, but what am I supposed to do, leave them ugly?
Anyway, we do not have our island or floor yet. We are going to go with a wood laminate floor, though. Like Pergo, only not quite as good (but not bad), and way less expensive. We are still doing some research, but we should be able to do 200 square feet for about $500 for materials and we are going to install it ourselves. For those of you not researching flooring, that is a really great price. We do not have any idea how to install a floor, but we are going to learn! Hopefully we can decide on something, tear out the old one and install the new one by the end of June.
I have spent a lot of hours on the internet researching islands, too. Out of the hundreds I have looked at the one I really want is $700. Daddy has put a price cap of $350 on my island, but so far I have not found one I really love in that price range; they are either too small or not my style. I will have to settle on this one, I guess, since I cannot have everything my way, and I am pretty much OK with it because almost any island is better than my current small and poorly placed cabinet. Anyway, I will keep you posted as I work on this project. Here are some before and after pics... How does it look?
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