When my parents moved into their home many years ago the only updates they made were adding new paint and all of their belongings. That’s it!

It’s now 15 plus years of them living in that home and my Mom has finally been bitten by my design bug.

Their kitchen has always looked mostly like this:

{This image is of course after all the counter tops had been cleaned off it’s never that empty and all of the hardware had been removed.}

Notice how the majority of the paint is peeling off. I think my mom tried to convince herself it was Shabby Chic.

This is the gaudy hardware that was centered on each cabinet.

Since my mom had recently changed the paint colors in the kitchen I need to work with the existing colors and take into account the floor tiles and countertops.

{After a quick trip to my local Home Depot and Benjamin Moore I had many colors to pick from. While I have many fan decks I still like to have the small swatches that I can move around. I also grabbed swatches of the paint colors on the wall.}

Here is a glimpse of what the walls look like on the opposite side of cabinets.

{What can I say we all love orange in this family so it wasn’t a surprise when Mom decided to go with a warm terra cotta shade.}

After a long deliberation with some swatches looking too green and some looking not green enough I picked BM’s Crownsville Gray HC-106

But before you can paint you need to make sure you prep the walls properly.

We used this to get rid of all the grease build-up, etc that happens in a kitchen:

After that we went around and patched up all the holes where the existing pulls were with Plastic Wood.  We did this because we were going to change the knob location for a more updated look.

Since we were painting the top cabinets a light shade I didn’t want to have a problem with stains showing through so we did a quick sand on all of the cabinets and gave them a coat of prime.

We had many days of the kitchen looking like this:

We then sanded again after the prime dried. This time it wasn’t as bad. Very light sanding was needed.

The cabinets in both colors took 2 coats of paint and a sanding in between.

We started thinking of this project on a Monday. We cleaned the walls that day and looked at swatches, bought paint and sanded on Tuesday. The remaining days were spent in one step of painting or another and by Saturday we were finished!

Voila a new kitchen (kinda) for around $300 in one week!

We all love it! The house had Italian tiles on the floor that we had to work with. So instead of trying to hide the fact that the kitchen had a bit of Tuscan/Mediterranean feel we went with it. The green/gray paint color not only picks up tones in the countertops, but the floor as well.

Painting the upper cabinets the same color as the existing wall color helped make the kitchen look more airy and open. It gave the illusion that the cabinets went all the way up to the ceiling.

In changing the knobs we updated the look yet again. We also swapped out the old facet with a clearance find at Home Depot for only $62 bucks, when very similar looking ones were going for $180-$220.

{Forgot to do a before shot of the sink so Jon was very helpful as my hand model!}

To be honest I’ve always been afraid to paint kitchen cabinets. The task seemed daunting and messy and I was never certain about how the paint would hold up.

If any of you are thinking about it I would highly recommend doing it. You would save yourself lots of money and for around $300 probably less if you don’t need new hardware you can give your tired kitchen a new lease on life.

I think the turn around time worked out well. The sanding, priming, painting etc was from Tuesday to Thursday evening. Friday was spent waiting for paint to dry and re-attaching the doors. Saturday was adding hardware, attaching new facet and window treatment and clean-up.

Even our little helper Jovi seems to agree. He was already on the look out for the kitchen mat, which he loves to take a snooze on.

Tomorrow I’ll have a follow-up post with some techniques that I used that made this whole process easy on me and will help you out if you are considering taking this kind of project on.