My DIY Kitchen Makeover: The Affair Is Over, But It Was Worth It!

Genmedmom here.

Last month, I posted about my crazy DIY kitchen makeover project. Well, we finished weeks ago, and we're thrilled. It just took me forever to figure out how to make before/ after photos. (FYI, the Scrapcollage app is fantastic, very easy to use.)

Our kitchen was perfectly nice. Nice and yellow. Honey oak cabinets and floors, yellow-beige walls. The overall effect was that anyone standing in our kitchen immediately developed jaundice.

Plus, we've lived here for almost ten years, and we've never painted the kitchen. It was time. Farmhouse is in, and so farmhouse we got.

So here we go, Benjamin Moore "Slate Gray" Cabinets and "Hardwood Putty" Walls. My uncle is a contractor who helped immensely with the priming and painting of the cabinets. Kudos to my mom as well, who did a whole lot of Ikea shopping and wall painting with me:

Our main entryway is the back door leading into the kitchen, and we have no closet there. The freestanding coatrack would get so heavy it fell down numerous times, so we were throwing overflow crap on the floor and a chair. That whole situation had to change. So I bought a cheap standing coat and hat rack at Ikea, which my uncle attached to the wall:

I also bought cheap Ikea bookcases which we made into storage benches, and my mom sewed removeable pillow covers out of the water-resistant fabric I'd bought on sale at Fabric.com. (Thanks again, mom!) These benches are game-changers: so super-sturdy, and useful:

We were sick of looking at the kitty litterbox, so I ordered a hideaway one on Amazon that's disguised as a little table, and stuck it under our new location for the message board (which is still a mess, but hey, it's the message board):

I repurposed a particleboard pantry I'd bought at Home Depot for sixty dollars like five years ago and was using to store all sorts of mishmosh. Painted it Benjamin Moore "Apollo Blue", changed the location, and now it holds cookware:

The best part about this makeover is it was mainly done for organization purposes, to help us to de-clutter. It certainly did that, and more. Overall, we are very happy!

We also did the dining room and bathroom, but those are posts for another day.

Got a project you want to tackle? Go for it!