KITCHEN CUPBOARDS

When we moved into our present home we knew that we were going to be doing a great deal of painting. The house is over a hundred years old. The building structure is very sound; however the previous owners had decorated with wallpaper in most of the rooms. The kitchen cupboards were stained a very dark walnut. The hardware was large and black. The exhaust hood on the stove was a dark copper color. This area is not very big and the dark kitchen cupboards made it seem even smaller. The walls had blue flowered wallpaper with a border that featured a Victorian woman in a gardening hat tending to a garden. We decided that this would be the room that we would paint first.

We started with the kitchen cupboards. We removed all the doors and spread them out on planks and saw horses in the garage. We decided that we were going to paint the kitchen cupboards. They were in good shape and we did not want the expense of new cabinets. We thought that they would look much better painted and down the road when we could afford it we could replace them. We decided that we would go with an off white color for the kitchen cupboards and a sunny yellow for the walls. The home improvement store showed us how to pre-treat the varnished surfaces so the paint would stick. They also recommended a primer to help reduce the number of coats of paints.

The removal of the wall paper did not go very well. The previous owners did not use sizing on the paper so it stuck to the sheet rock underneath. As a result once we finally had the paper and glue removed from the walls we had to have the walls re-mudded. We then had to prime before we could paint. What started out as a weekend project took us two weeks.

We purchased a new stove hood in an off white that matched the kitchen cupboards. We bought new hinges and a nice knob with a brushed antique finish with an off white ceramic center. The project took us longer than we anticipated, but it was well worth the effort. The kitchen now appears to be much bigger than it did before. The lighter colors of the cabinets as well as the painted walls are much more pleasant to look at than the flowered paper and the woman with the gardening hat. We now need to start peeling the wallpaper off of the walls in the other rooms.