Painting Cabinets + My Mom's Hip

Since I was starting to feel so much better pregnancy wise. We did the next logical thing and took on a massive house project. Haha, it actually feels a little insane, but I know that it is a better time than with a new baby. Plus it gave me something good to obsess about during this pregnancy. The second trimester is typically a little rough for me emotionally (haha, everything is rough about this pregnancy) so this was a nice distraction for all of that. I read probably 100 articles about painting cabinets. So when we actually started the process, we felt very well researched.

First step was unloading all of the stuff from our cabinets. Wow, it turns out that we fit a ton of stuff into our little cabinets. We took over the front room and dining room with kitchen supplies. It was like this for a few weeks, so thankfully we had a bit of a system worked out. I somehow didn't take a proper photo of it, but it was pretty full. We also had to take the appliances out of their locations. Fortunately we could still plug in the microwave and the refrigerator, but there was no using the stove or oven during that time. Also, during the actual painting weekend there was no using the dishwasher. We used disposable dishes that weekend, which felt pretty wasteful, but thankfully we don't use hardly any paper goods like that regularly.

After that was a lot, a lot of sanding. This was maybe the first time that I had ever been grateful to have such a tiny kitchen. It still took us a full day one Saturday to sand the cabinets and doors. I guess part of the process that day was using a degreaser (cleaning it) and deglosser (did nothing as far as we could tell).
We also went through quite the process trying to decide what color paint to get. Turns out that there is a zillion colors of white paint. The recommendations that we read online looked different in person. Then the paint samples that we got at the store didn't match the little paint chips that we had picked them from. Yeah, it was a headache. Eventually though we just went with what we thought looked best, even though it isn't as highly recommended because it is a cooler tone of white.

We did not want to take out the dishwasher because it was kind of a pain to install, so we just wrapped the whole thing in plastic because we super didn't want any primer or paint to get on it. You know, our brand new dark stainless appliances.

We decided to use the heavy duty, super bonding oil based primer. This was a bit of a debate because it has terrible fumes. Also, it doesn't clean up easily since it isn't water based. So I took Holland to the park for the entire morning one Friday, while John donned a mask and went to work painting primer while attempting to not cause any kind of mess with it.

Once again, we think we have this tiny kitchen, how do we have so many stinkin' doors to sand/prime/paint. Holy guacamole. And because we were so well researched we were doing this right, which meant doing a light sanding and wipe down between coats. Just looking at the pictures now makes me feel so glad that we are done with this. It makes John so glad too.

It took a full 3 coats of paint plus a coat of primer to get full coverage on the cabinets. I was surprised by this because we have never had to do more than two. We also ended up caulking some of the cracks in the doors and trim.

John took on a cool aspect of this project to change the hinges for the cabinets. He decided to do hidden hinges with a soft close feature. I love them. There is no slamming of doors anymore. It is pretty cool.

We figured out pretty fast that we needed to paint the soffet, trim and pantry door a matching color of white. Turns out our other white almost looks cream next to this bright white. 

We loved how it turned out, even though it was a ton of work. The next step is counter tops. Yikes that expensive. I'll have to do another post about that after they are installed and hopefully are completely gorgeous.
Our plans are to cut down the bar top and extend the peninsula out a foot and a half to create more counter top space. We are doing this by adding some posts to the right of the dishwasher. Then hopefully soon John will add some open shelving there to add just a little bit of storage to the kitchen.
We figured out that doing the posts really complicated our counter top project. Basically we only found one guy who had done it before (and wouldn't have to have his learning experience be in our kitchen). Of course this guy seems like the most expensive that we have talked to from install to getting the actual quartz.
We think that the adjustments will be worth it though. We went to a couple of stone warehouses and looked at the big slabs. We also met with the installer and picked three samples to choose from. They don't exactly have price tags on them though. So it just happened to work out that the counter top selection we choose is in the highest price point category. Of course.

We settled on the one on the right. Here is it in a full slab. I think it is going to be gorgeous. 

We took a drawer to check the color of white with the cabinets. I just love it. 

On a less fun note, my dad came down to Scottsdale like normal this year to sell his wood at the art show. Unfortunately, even though we had tried to convince my mom to stay with us kids (maybe in a rotation?) she really wanted to live by herself. She lasted only a couple weeks before she fell and broke her hip on the tile. It was a rough time at first. For a good week at the hospital she had increasing oxygen needs. Also, she couldn't keep any food down. It was not good. My siblings were there pretty much 24/7 for a while. My dad of course flew up there and only just now came back to clean up the booth from the show. Kind of terrible all around. Thankfully, we had a couple of weeks with him. I just feel so bad that she went through this. So much pain and so much physical therapy. She was in a rehab facility for about 2 months and only got out yesterday. That's got to have been an effort in endurance for her.