As you can tell from above, the “before” kitchen had a lot going on. The top kitchen cabinet doors had stained glass door inserts and bottom had a busy wallpaper. The door frames themselves, however, were solid wood (painted white) and in good condition.
The pictures below were taken by the talented Claire Pieron, who took a ton of photos of the house for his before we did any major work. (The idea is that in 15 years, you won’t even know our house was at one point a major fixer-upper but we’ll have the photographs to prove it!)
Anyway, I’m sharing these two in particular because they show the kitchen cabinets without the stained glass or wallpapered inserts in the doors. When we started the kitchen demo, we took off all the cabinet doors as I’ve already described to you. A bonus was the stained glass and wallpapered inserts came out of the frames pretty easily. Don’t worry– we’re not planning on throwing away all the stained glass inserts. (Not sure what we’ll do with them yet, but they’re in great condition… if you have any ideas, let me know!) Rather than get all new cabinet doors, we decided to hire a local carpenter to replace the inserts for us!
(Yes, the inside of each cabinet is currently a dark blue!)
We gave the carpenter all the cabinet door frames and he’s busy working on a simple paneled insert for them. He showed me a sample of what they’ll look like and I think it will be perfect: simple and farmhouse-y, but classic and stylish too. I decided I wanted to have glass doors around the fridge area for glasses, and he said he can do that too! He’ll just give them back to us without a lick of paint on them and we’ll take care of priming/ sanding/ painting to cut down on costs. I am going to buy Capitol White paint by Benjamin Moore for the cabinets and see which green goes well for a beadboard backsplash! One step at a time…
Lynne