Kitchen Ceiling

After about two weeks of open ceiling, we finally got around to getting a drywall guy in to fix our ceiling. We did discuss installing the drywall ourselves, but realized that it would take a lot of time and probably a lot of fights!

Prior to the drywall guys, we roughed in the new lights. We replaced the outdated florescent light fixtures with new LED disk lights. They will last for 25,000 hours (according to the manufacturer, 20-something years) and are dimmable down to 30%. What I liked best about these lights is that they have the flat look of can/recessed lights, but fit into a standard j-box (it's a tight fit, but they fit).

This was about the time I wanted to cry for starting this project! I was so tired of working on the kitchen all the time, and Alex was out of town. Luckily, my mood was uplifted in a six hour span on a Friday (thanks to the drywall guys!) I only have photos of the drywall from my phone, so I apologize for the quality of them!

If you noticed that there is an 8 inch space between the tops of our cabinets and the ceiling (and pipes exposed), you are right! Our plan, to make up for the space between the ceiling and the top of the cabinets, is to build a type of soffit that would extend the cabinet up to the ceiling. These blogs were my inspiration:
My Tropical Cottage
piccadillypeddler
The Lettered Cottage
sweetsomethingdesign

More on that later...

Kitchen Update

Sometimes, I think my husband hates me. Example: last month, I decided it was finally time to paint our kitchen cabinets. Now, our kitchen cabinets are in surprisingly good condition, they were just ugly oak, faded and dated. So, they needed a face lift. As well as painting the cabinets, we planned to replace the florescent light fixtures. Here is the before (pardon the messiness):

And here comes the part where I'm pretty sure that Alex hates me. After we took down the plastic cover on the drop ceiling, I wanted to see what was behind the drywall. Because, like always, I had this ideal picture in my head about what we were going to do. This is what happened....

 After, Day 1:

 After tearing down the entire drop ceiling, we had a bit of a freakout (which is understandable). But, while having this freakout, we could already see how much nicer the kitchen was going to look. The cabinet doors are all down and in the garage to be painted. We used Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations in Autumn. It was a lot of work (degloss, two coats of bond paint, glazing and then the top coat). All in all, we thought it teared out well on our test door. It changes the color, but still retains the look of real wood. 

 You can still see the grain.....

More to follow....