Renovations!!

I just renovated my kitchen, by myself, for free!

Well, I'm not 100% finished, but very close. And it won't be 100% free, but almost! I still have to buy some handles for the cupboard doors and the drawers.

The renovations mostly consisted of painting and removing wood trim. I am not a fan of wood trim. I am a white trim kind of girl. White trim looks good in any situation.

Here are a couple of pictures of the kitchen before I did anything to it:

See how 80's it looked? It was pretty dark for being mostly white. Most of the walls, 4 out of 5 of the appliances and the back splash are white, but because of the dark green counter top and the wood trim around everything, it seemed so old and dark.

Here are some before and after pictures:

(I should have cleared the counters before I took the after pictures)

This is looking at the back door and the oven.

(Notice the wood trim around the oven and the shelf above)

This is after I painted the wood trim, added some place-holder handles on the lower cupboards (to see if they would look right) and fixed up the storage space above the oven.

And yes, that is a laptop hanging on the wall.... I'm married to Steve Day the computer genius. Steve actually hung that there as a surprise for me. He knows I like to look at recipes online while cooking, so it's my Kraft.ca laptop :) What he may not know, is that I also like to listen to dance music while I cook, so I can work off some of the calories I'm about to eat! So it's also my youtube laptop :)

Doesn't it seem brighter already?!

This is a before picture of the other side of the kitchen.

(The sink/dishwasher area).

This is the sink/dishwasher area after I painted (almost) everything white. I left the counter top trim unpainted because 1) I don't know yet if the paint I have will be strong enough to stand up to every day use on a counter top and 2) I don't need EVERYTHING to be white.

This is a before picture of my stove area.

And here it is after I painted it white.

Unfortunately, I forgot to take some good before/after pictures of the removal of the wood trim that was hanging below the upper cupboards. You can see them in the first two pictures, and you can see that they're gone in the other pictures.

The kitchen is so bright and clean and white and nice now. I love it!

Painting the living room is going to be one of my next projects. I have paint chips taped up in three places around the room to see the paint colours in different lighting. I am 99% sure I found a favourite, but I have to wait until Steve gets home before I can decide for sure. (It's his house too, so I guess he should have a say in what colour the living room is)

The colours all look pretty similar in this picture, but they're quite different. I think we're going with a grey colour. My favourite is called Surreal Blue.

I will continue to (excitedly) blog about our home improvements as they happen.