This is How I Changed My Kitchen, In Case You're Wondering

Very recently, I moved house. Not just any old house, My Own House.
That's right my legion of readers, we bought a zoo! I mean a house.

And so Steve and myself are in the process of doing it up to our liking.

Before we moved in we painted all the walls white, because they were the colour of your nightmares. The upstairs landing, for example, had two deep red walls, one a dirty yellow, and the fourth was a grey/green. This was teamed with a musty red carpet. Ace.

Once we had a relatively blank canvas, we began adding personality. The personality that existed in the house before was that of an old, confused man, who smokes weed a lot and is angry and has possibly been wearing those socks all month.
Now it's a blissed out hippie who has reached enlightenment and is just chilling out, floating there.

The kitchen was the first room I did.

So here it is, before we got our mitts on it.

Let's have a little look at this combination, shall we?
We have
- grey and terracotta floor tiles.
- greasy (unfortunately yes, that is true) wood-effect vinyl-covered kitchen cabinets
- a black vinyl worktop with more than a few burn marks
- dark, mottled red splashback

Overall, a match made in hell. Everything seems to blend into each other, with sudden punctuations of "where the fuck did that colour come from?". Improbable, but true.

My first thought was that I was going to have to paint those cabinets. Replacing the kitchen was not a reality I was able to enter, and anyway, an upcycling challenge was just the job for my summer holidays.

At first, I was being persuaded on all sides not to paint the cabinets. They were "Shaker Style", I was assured by the estate agent, and he may have also used the word "wood". Lies. When I got a chance to have a proper, close-up look at it, I found peeling vinyl, with marks,bubbles and general mess. It had to go.

Having never done a DIY job to this scale, I was nervous at every step. Mostly because at each step I had to convince everyone around me that my ideas were solid (fiance, mom, father-in-law etc...) So in the back of my mind I was thinking "Jeeze, these ideas better be solid"

Anyway, I  started peeling.
Now, this might be an overreaction, but I don't think it is. If you are going to peel all the vinyl off anything,wear one of those goddamn welding masks. Seriously. I wear glasses, so at least my eyes were somewhat protected, but that vinyl went flicking out and flying all over the room like nobody's business. It flew off in little sharp shards, and fast. It was not a fun job. Plus it kept getting caught under my nails and uuuggghhhhh.

So now I had bare MDF/chipboard/ I dunno (I hope you didn't come here for specifics,or someone who knows what she's talking about) and was ready to get painting.

I also removed all the handles and cleaned them up. More on that later

Naturally,I hit Pinterest for some inspiration.Here's what I came up with....

I loved the idea of open-shelving like this,

 but I had to admit that practicality took over

 (for me! Crazy, huh?)

 and I knew that it wouldn't provide enough storage

 in our tiny kitchen 

without looking cluttered. 

 This one gave me hope for our floor.

I knew I wasn't going to be able to replace the tiles

for a long time, cos money.

Now I know that these tiles are significantly nicer (look at those beautiful pentagon shapes...) 

but they were the same sort of colour,

and I had thought straight up "No" to terracotta and

all its associates. But actually, this was quite nice.

 And then we began to get somewhere. I loved the 

sophistication of a navy kitchen.

So grown-up, so swish, and still...Blue.

It was a fun colour in an adult way.
(also, how gorgeous is the wooden countertop? Unfortunately
I had to keep my black, cracked one. But someday!)

Everyone thought it was a very silly thing to do- paint our narrow, dark kitchen navy blue.

We have one big bay window on the other wall, under which our table and chairs would sit, but there was no window in the cooking area.

Worse, there was one light fixture in the middle of the long room, illuminating one pool of terracotta tiles, and providing neither the kitchen nor dining space with any discernible lighting.

But I knew this was the way to go,this was the right colour for our kitchen.

We had painted every room in the house white, I knew I didn't want white kitchen cabinets too. And shades of grey were nice, and one of my favourite colour schemes in modern interiors, but I wasn't feeling it in the kitchen. 

This kitchen needed a bit of joy.

The problem was the dark red splashback.

Again, here was something I couldn't afford to replace, and so would have to improvise with.

I knew that if I painted the cabinets navy while the red tiles were still staring back at me, it would make me hate all of it, and people would be like "See? You're crazy."

So. I decided to paint the tiles. 

My plan was to go white (I internally screamed at the thought of the million coats it would need) and then paint the grout dark grey. The tiles are square, and I wanted to outline every second one so that it made them look rectangular. Ha! Subway tiles at a budget of about 10 quid.

The process for the tiles was easy peasy, it turned out!

- Clean. Scrub them tiles down good.
- Use masking tape to cover your countertop and around your sockets etc
- Prime. As much as I tried to get away from this step (primer is expensive, and priming is boring), there's no escaping it. In the end, I did TWO coats of primer. I used Bin Tile Primer. It went on so well (I just used a small, spongy roller) and had such a great effect, I thought two coats might help it last longer. Time will tell!
- Top coat! I only had to do one coat of my final paint, which was brilliant. I used paint for interior wood and metal, in brilliant white with a satin finish.

And that's it! The tiles came out shiny white, and they have remained so for one month. I assume that they will last forever, cos that would be just great.
I held off doing the grout because I liked the simple look of the plain white so much, but maybe in the future I will! Let me know if you decide to!

Now I was ready to do the cabinets.

- As they were MDF or whatever, there was no need to sand them down first. Win!
- But still, they had to be primed. More Bin primer for me (that stuff is expensive, but real good). These guys only needed one coat of that

It went on real nice!
(as you can see here, my timeline is all over the place. The tiles have one coat of primer and half the vinyl isn't even peeled. I'm organising here in a step-by-step for clarity, not because I can do things in a step-by-step manner)

Once that was all done I started having reservations about the blue. I knew it would be awesome, but suddenly the white looked so clean and fresh. So I hummed and hawed about it and then shouted "FUCK IT" (which was surprising for my fiance cos it was 3am) and the next day I went to the hardware shop to pick the colour.

The colour I chose was from Dulux and it was called Sapphire Springs 1. Now, if you look that up, you will find a rich, dark grey-blue which gave the man in the hardware shop a heart attack when I told him it was to be the colour for my kitchen.

In reality, it is very much a little-boys-room-blue (my turn to have a heart attack)

After spending so long convincing myself to go for a dark, sophisticated navy, here I was, painting my kitchen as if it were in a playhouse.

I decided to do all the bottom cabinets first, to see how they looked. It took me a while to be convinced, but after 3 coats, I was starting to feel it.

It was definitely not the navy of my dreams, but it was pretty close. 

And then I started to realise what everyone meant by the claustrophobic effects it might have. 

SO! I decided to finish the top cabinets in white. They were already primed, now it was just a matter of giving them one white topcoat. My thinking was I could always go back over them with the blue if I so decided.

But once it was all done, and the doors screwed back on, it looked great!! So bright, so fresh, so far away from the stank it once was.

Before putting the handles back on, I decided to paint them gold because GOLD.
Another easy, but time-consuming job.

-First, prime them with the same primer that the tiles got, and leave to dry. I used a brush cos a roller would have been stupid.

- Next, take them outside on a sunny day and spray them GOLD BABY. I used this guy, which is very good.
-Keep on spraying. I did about three coats, because I kept finding bits I'd missed.

They weren't perfectly smooth (because of the many coats or their awkward shape, I don't know) but I love them.
They totally finished the kitchen for me.

Aw man, I love it so much!!!

We got all our retro looking appliances in Aldi and Lidl, and our excellent bread basket in Dunnes Stores. Ignore all the crap on the countertop there, we still don't have a lot of furniture and places to store things...

And, can you see? My father-in-law, who is an electrician, fit some recessed lighting in the roof, to light up the actual kitchen! And there's some more LED lighting strips going under the top cabinets cos we fancy.

Even the weird floors don't look so bad now that they're not blending into everything else.

Yes, the cooker is peeking out. That's because there's a gas pipe keeping it from being flush with the wall. Another problem for another day.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that one cabinet had no DOOR? Yeah, the previous owners pissed me off on more than one occasion.

As for the other side of the room.... Well, that was also the pits.

But isn't it a great space?
An oval table obviously does nothing with the lovely bay window, and those table and chairs are acting suspiciously blendy....
But the blinds are pretty good, as they're quite pretty and give a lot of privacy when you ain't got a front garden.

So when we got our hands on it, we transformed it the best we could!

Okay, not the best picture, apologies. (my herbs were dying, but I've since brought them back to life and added to the collection! And my notebooks and pencil cases are everywhere because I'm working on a wee wedding project too...)
But look how much prettier! Our small round table (the old kitchen table from myparents' house which they gifted us!) tucks in nicely to the space while still being big enough to seat a small family.
We bought our knock-off Eames style chairs at Homestore & More, when they were on sale.
The plan is to eventually build in a pretty window seat, to give way more seating (and hopefully storage), but for now, those two wooden chairs will do (we pulled them from a skip a while back and cleaned them up. I told you- no money. Also, who dumps fine chairs like that?)
And maybe my favourite part, my father-in-law installed a new light fitting right over the table, and popped up this beautiful light from Ikea.

And that's my kitchen! It's very much a work in progress, but sure that's half the craic.
Let me know what you think/ would change/ have done similarly, and I'll keep you updated too!