Life After the NICU: Learning to Roll With the Punches

When our agent first told me there was brick in the kitchen of the house we were about to walk through, at first I couldn't imagine it, then I was prepared to hate it. As it turns out, I LOVE it! Since I first saw this kitchen, it has gone through a few transformations, some at the former owners hands and some at mine, and more are to come. . .

This is how the kitchen looked the first time I saw it.

Upon first glance, it appeared that the cabinets were brand new and gorgeous!! As we looked closer, we found that some were, in fact, new. Yet some just had new doors, but the base was painted white, which meant our only option was to paint. I was extremely disappointed at first, but as I researched more I warmed to the idea. I found that with the brick details in the kitchen, I could go with a 'French Country' theme, painting the cabinets a nice buttercream color and then using a glaze. After getting a quote from a local cabinet maker/painter for $3000 to paint and glaze, I decided that just wasn't worth it! We could install all new cabinets for that! I knew I would have to go a different route, but wasn't sure what that would be just yet. So the sellers were nice enough to agree to paint them for me before they moved.

The next time I saw the kitchen, it looked like this:

It was starting to get there, but still wasn't exactly what I wanted. My next step was to paint the kitchen green and update the appliances to all new stainless steel .

Here's how it looked after replacing the appliances:

Now we're getting somewhere! I LOVE the look of the stainless appliances with the buttercream cabinets! After living in the house for a while, I knew I needed some sort of window treatment for privacy, but didn't want to lose the natural light provided by the windows. So blinds were NOT an option, although we did add them to every other window in the house. I began to research window treatment options that would keep true to the 'French Country' style to which I had committed. I decided to go with cafe curtains. I found a gorgeous idea on Martha Stewart's website to use tea towels with cafe curtain clips. Unfortunately, my windows were not the correct size to go with this method, so I modified the idea a bit. I found some beautiful crisp white linen fabric and sewed curtains to fit my windows. (I also replaced two of the recessed lights with pendant lights.)

Here's how the kitchen began to morph as the curtains were added:

The next object of my attention became the hardware. I knew I wanted something less modern, but it took several trips to our local Lowes and many returns to figure out that they didn't have what I wanted. I began to look online. I found a wonderful site that carried a set of hardware appropriately called "French Country". I figured I couldn't go wrong with that! lol So I counted doors and drawers and made my order. As soon as they arrived, I began the laborous process of removing the old ones, filling the holes, painting, measuring for the new ones, drilling new holes, and installing the new hardware. If that wasn't complicated enough, I realized why the previous owners had chosen bin pulls in the first place. Several of the corner drawers had to be trimmed to prevent banging into the intersecting drawer pull! We had to flip one cabinet door so that the knobs looked right, and we had to get creative to install the handle on the pull out trash drawer, but it was all worth it!

After they were all installed, I realized that it would look better if there were drawer pulls on the 'dummy' drawers under the sink and next to the oven. So I made an additional order and am awaiting that arrival any day now!

It would be very easy to call it finished at this point, but I've had it in my mind all along that I want the cabinets to be 'glazed'. That's where I'm stuck! I'd like to add some trim to these shaker style cabinets in order to have some area for the glaze to gather. I bought some trim from Lowes and stuck it up with doubled sided tape just to 'try it on for size'. It's not painted, so it's hard to tell, but I think it could work if installed correctly and painted before glazing.

The following picture is NOT my kitchen, but a friend's kitchen that is my inspiration. I LOVE the rope moulding around the top and can envision this on my cabinets. I also love the golden glaze they have used. I'm aware that my cabinets will never be these cabinets, but I think I can take some of the ideas used here to get the look I had in mind . . .