Cabinet Reveal

I am finally getting around to posting about my cabinets. In my old house I thought many times about repainting my cabinets but reading blogs about how difficult it was always stopped me. When I started painting these ones at the new house I was determined to have a different tune to sing to all my viewers, telling the blogging world that it really wasn't that bad to do my cabinets. After 4 weeks of painting and feeling like giving up hundreds of times, I am sad to say that painting cabinets IS NOT easy. I do feel like I had no other choice and these cabinets were nothing to write home about to begin with, so I could really do anything and they would have been improved.
I do have some tips that I will try to follow when I do my bathroom cabinets and those are...
1- get good paint, do your research and find some that will not require 6 coats (which mine did, no exaggeration)
2 - polyacrilic the outside, I did do this and I just love that it gives it a resistant finish
3 - take the doors and hardware off to paint them. It's just easier, I tried both ways and off is much faster.
So here we go, with the before and after pics.

This is what the house looked like the day we moved in. I will be honest, I did wonder if we made the right choice when I walked through this kitchen.

This is how the floor was left when they pulled out their fridge. I was so disgusted, I took a picture because I wanted to remember how much work this house really took.

First step: Pop out the existing inserts, I want beadboard instead. Now "pop out" makes this steap sound really easy, this was the most physical part of the whole project, countless nights I went home with bloody knuckles because it was so difficult. Then I got smarter and started wearing gloves.

Step 2: take off all the cabinet doors, and start priming

I wanted beadboard around the island. The day that I brought it over to put it in before the flooring went in, the flooring guy happened to be there, and installed it for me. SO NICE!

Step 3: paint the drawers. I got antsy and wanted to see something finished so I went and installed all the hardware on the drawers before the cabinets were done. Lots of math and measuring was used for the hardware, it felt so good to put hardware on, and it's amazing the difference it makes.Step 4: install beadboard. We did this at my husbands work, they have a giant saw and got them all cut and stapled in, in less then an hour.At this point, I was sick of having my kitchen in ruins, by now we had moved in, and cooking was difficult to have my kitchen chaotic. So we hung them up and I thought I would paint them hanging. Which I did but I wouldn't recommend it, it took forever. The last and final coat I took them down and it was so much faster, I should have done that from the beginning but oh well.The final reveal!!! You also get to see our new flooring in these pics, which I just love, and no we did not do that ourselves.
This pic shows the new lights we installed also. The beginning photos show the old lights that had to come down.