Make-it-work Wednesday: Home "improvement"

I'm pretty well aware that our "After" kitchen is most people's version of a "Before."  But we pride ourselves on being able to do pretty awesomely eco-fabulous renovations to our home, and we pulled this one off like nobody's business.  And when I say "Eco-Fabulous," I mean not only eco-friendly, but amazingly eco-nomic also.

Let me take you on a little pictorial journey of how we upgraded our cabinet doors, and put new hardware on them for free...

Our kitchen Before (kind of)

This is what our kitchen had looked like for the last 3 years.  We took the cabinet doors off when we first moved in, knowing that refinishing them was going to be a future project (not knowing that it was going to be quite so far into the future).

 In a fit of motivation last Summer, my husband primed all the cabinet doors, and I panted the insides of them the same funky green that we pained our counter tops.  Yes, we have super classy, painted counter tops, and trust me, it's leaps and bounds better than what was there when we moved in.  But there the doors sat in the basement for almost another year.

Then a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to buckle down and get this project finished.  So I brought them back upstairs and got to work on their cosmetic surgery.  The doors used to have a design carved into them that wasn't offensive in any way, but wasn't done with the highest quality craftsmanship either (you can see it in the photo above).  So I filled them in with joint compound (it took 4 coats), sanded them down, re-primed them, and painted them in the same color we used 3 years ago to paint the cabinet frames.  Save your paint, folks.  It comes in wicked handy later on for procrastinator projects.

To get our cabinet door hardware for free, we poached them from another renovation project we're currently working on in our bedroom.

Hubby taking a final look at the construction of the built-in before the smashing and bashing of it took place.

The built-in dresser was cool, but we needed room to bump out the wall on the other side of the room to make way for a small master bathroom (squeal!).  Housing 16 drawers with 2 handles on each one, plus those extra wall cabinets, there was more than enough hardware on there to outfit our kitchen.  So we tore out the dresser, saved all the drawer-pulls from it, and they found their new lease on life as kitchen cabinet hardware.

Our kitchen After (almost)

Wallah!  Kitchen reno done for cheap!  Hubby still has a lighting project to complete for over the pass-through area (not quite visible on the left), and I still have to put the door on the lower corner cabinet by the stove and fashion a curtain or something for the other lower cabinet (not pictured) next to the fridge.  Somehow the doors to that one have gone missing.  But all in all, I'm happy with the result.

Thanks for stopping by,
-Lindsey