Kitchen Progress

One of our priorities for the last few days before we have to be fully moved in to the house is kitchen.  We want to get the kitchen as clean and as finished as we can so that we are able to use it once we are living in the house.  There's no way that a full kitchen remodel will be in our budget anytime soon so the plan is just to strip and paint the walls and cabinets to make it as pretty as possible for now.

The kitchen before:

We've made some progress but also hit a few snags along the way.  Click to keep reading and see what we've been working on!

We've spent much of our time so far stripping wallpaper in the kitchen.  There are several layers (at least five in some places) but the wallpaper goes right down to the plaster in most places, so it actually comes off pretty easily.  In some places there is some sort of paint or plaster covering which makes things a little more complicated.  We're just going to have to keep working on it until we can see the full picture.

In at least one place we will have to do some plaster repair.  In small areas we can probably do the repairs ourselves, but we plan to call a professional for this nice area around the house's old stovepipe where all the plaster crumbled away right down to the lath underneath:

Along the way we pulled up the carpet that was throughout the kitchen and in the bottoms of some of the cabinets.  There is a pretty decent tile underneath that we can clean up and keep for a while.  We also had to clean out the fridge which had been turned off and left closed and had begun to look and smell a little like a science experiment.  Finally, we've started pulling apart the old cabinets in the kitchen to get the wallpaper out of them and get them ready to be painted.  Even the drawers had wallpaper in them!  The screws and hinges were all painted over and many of the screws were stripped so we had to go out and buy a screw extracting set to get many the cabinet doors off.  Such a process.  Once we get it all apart we'll be sanding everything down and giving it all a fresh coat of white paint.

We'll keep you updated and post a full reveal once the project is complete.  Also, watch for a post on our kitchen colors coming soon!