Picture this: a beautiful farmhouse built in 1900 set on a large grassy hill overlooking vast expanses of farm fields with a perfect sunset view. Then picture that someone took that farmhouse and remodeled the kitchen in the 70's.
Recently, my brother bought the farmhouse I just described! While he was out of town for a weekend I decided to surprise him by overhauling the kitchen to a more charming, farmhouse feel. Here's the thing about my brother though, he's wasn't exactly thrilled. In fact, I would describe it more as upset.
Here are the before pictures, take a look at the oven installed into the cabinets and say bye-bye!
We used Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Paris Grey as the base coat under the cabinets, and pure white on top. I replaced the copper hardware with simple black wrought iron handles. This involved filling the old hardware holes with putty, and drilling new holes for the new hardware - one of the most time consuming steps.
Additionally there was no "in cabinet" storage in the kitchen for trash. One of my biggest pet peeves is visible trash cans in a kitchen - ew! We ripped out a shelf in one of the lower cabinets and installed rollers for a trash and recycling bin to be tucked away.
We painted the existing doors white, and framed pieces of bead board to make them fit in with the farmhouse vibe, and give them some texture. We also replaced the door hardware with black handles to match the new hardware on the cabinets.
One of the biggest challenges was removing the old oven, and safely capping off the electricity. The oven was hardwired into the wall. Fortunately my dad is pretty savvy in this area and was able to figure out the wiring harness so we could take it out! We painted this cubby, as well as the cubby on the wall of cabinets in the dining area, put antique barn wood on the base, and ran some new lights that I made myself with mason jars and galvanized steel piping. Did you know Hobby Lobby has so many different size mason jars?? I was a wee bit overwhelmed.
I had a lot of help on this project (thanks everyone) and we were able to finish in three days, just in time for my brother to come home. Fortunately, he loved it!