Once upon a time there was an ugly little kitchen that looked like this:

After living with the kitchen for awhile, its homeowners decided that they would not tear down any walls to make it more open and kind of enjoyed being able to close the door on the mess.  The kitchen sighed with relief.

However, change was in the air.  (You can read about our initial decision making process in this post.)

The first thing that needed to be changed (besides a functional sink) was the cupboards.  I love yellow, but that terrible paint job had to go.  I had painted cupboards 3 other times in my life and was never happy with the results, so I looked into using chalk paint.  The general consensus on the internet (or Pinterest at least) is that chalk paint is practically magic.

I used the Country Chic line of paint and am quite happy with the results so far.  If you’re in the Humboldt Area, you can buy it at Free Spirit Market.  I’ll be posting more about my chalk paint experiences in the future. (No affiliate links are used in this post.  I’m not that fancy yet.)

We also wanted to change up the knobs and decided to go with these beauties from Free Spirit Market.

The pulls are already on the drawers and they look gorgeous, although I still have to paint the screws black.

I might paint the knobs brassy part black, but I’m going to wait until I see more of them on the doors.  (We’re still waiting for the order to come in.)

This weekend I finished painting the walls a dark grey and finally said goodbye to that ugly flooring!

When I pulled up the flooring I was relieved to see that the floors were in pretty good shape, although they do have a lot of glue from the linoleum on them.  I also discovered that a previous homeowner was serious about getting rid of the squeaky floor, as there are five lines of nails (about a meter long each) driven into the floor.

I always wondered why the kitchen was the only room in the house that didn’t seem to have a squeaky floor.  I’ll be spending some serious time with a nail set in the future!

Now for the reveal!

So much better!   This cabinet was originally by the fridge in an awkward, dark, wallpapered corner.  I moved it so I could get at the wallpaper and test out how some more useful counter space would feel.  It’s impossible to set the counter flush against the wall because of the radiator and baseboards, so I will install a custom set up with the same butcher block we used by the sink later on.