The kitchen was our home's most glaring example of "contractor-grade" tract home blah. It came complete with original lighting, appliances, scratched-up counters, ugly cheap faucet, and those horribly bland cabinets. It needed lots of help and we were on our usual budget of no dollars and 00 cents. So we saved and planned for a while and got a cheap, but much nicer, faucet and bargain light fixtures. Our big splurge was a new gas range and dishwasher. It was nice to feel a little more up-to-date and not have rust on our dishes after we'd washed them. Ideally, we would have loved to rip out all the cabinets and redesign the kitchen with all new cabinets and counters.... there's a million new cabinet designs out there that would look great in here. But, as I mentioned, we are working on a budget- a VERY tight budget ($0.00) - so we had to be creative.
We decided to paint all the cabinets white with a contrasting color on the doors. Strangely, I got the idea from the kitchen on "Two and 1/2 Men". We had the typical plain cabinet doors with a narrow trim around the edge that just seemed very boring. So Neil added a small half-round about an inch inside the original trim to give the appearance of a wider trim.
We spent forever priming and painting and then added a light burnt umber glaze to give the cabinets a more worn look and a little dimension. We then added a clear varnish to help protect it from the elements.
We added nickel knobs and drawer pulls, as our cabinets originally had none and we didn't think that functioned well.
Overall, the kitchen turned out quite well and really has a big impact for very little cost (just lots of labor). We enjoy cooking and eating much more now that we are no longer nauseated by the look of our cabinets.
Of course, there's still the ugly worn counter-tops, but that's going to take a little more than our current budget allows, so we'll have to wait.
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