Transformation of a Cottage Kitchen Part 2: Antique / Farmhouse Style Red Cabinet Makeover

Kitchen cabinetry. Really, your kitchen cabinetry can be considered one of the major furniture pieces of your home and, to say the least, You'll be amazed at how easily your old cabinets can be transformed into something new and beautiful!the focal point of your kitchen. But what do you do if you have boring and basic cabinets and don't want to {or can't afford to} rip them out and replace them entirely? I'd like to share with you how we changed the look and feel of our cabinets, and therefore, the look and feel of our entire kitchen. In our case, we were stuck with builder basic oak cabinets. On one hand, we were very fortunate because as basic as they were, they were good, solid wood cabinets - except for the sides and interior, which were made of some kind of cheap, composite material.

I present to you our kitchen before our cabinet makeover began:


First things first...off with the cabinet doors!


Here is what the sides of our cabinets looked like. {You can see that I did a test run of the red paint I was contemplating.}


To begin our cabinet transformation, we added beadboard to to the sides of the cabinetry. The face of the cabinets extended out past the sides just a bit, which created a recessed space that the beadboard fit into perfectly.


We added a panel to the bottom of the cabinets which housed our wiring for the undercabinet lighting.


Next we added some trim to the bottom of the cabinet....





And then crown moulding to the top...

Under the crown moulding, we added some decorative rope moulding.


One whole cabinet trimmed out and primed! Now the rest of the cabinets to go!



{Ugh! What a mess it was there for a while!}


Finally, the rest of the cabinets primed and one whole cabinet completely finished painting - a foregleam of what was to come!


Little did I know that this was the first of many, many coats of red paint...


The doors were degreased, sanded, primed...


And painted, painted, painted, painted, and painted!


Then, the edges were sanded just a bit for a distressed look.


Oh, and then there were the drawers! Thank goodness there were only six!




The insides of all the cabinets were primed and painted as well. I applied wallpaper for lining, and protected it with several layers of clear polyeurothane.




The wallpaper lining adds some color and charm to the inside of the cabinets, don't you think? In the future, I may use pages of old cookbooks to line the shelves. I need to grow my collection of old cookbooks first...


Here are a few closeups of the finished cabinet makeover, starting with the sides. Looks much better than the faux wood grain that was there to begin with!















Eventually, we added a brick paver backsplash and a new countertop.



It's amazing what a little extra trim and paint can do for kitchen cabinets! Big bang for very few bucks!




So before you rip out those old cabinets and replace them with brand new, why not see if you can change them completely by adding some pretty trim mouldings and then painting them a new color? Even if you can't add the trim yourself, it would still be less expensive {as opposed to spending thousands for new cabinets} to hire a carpenter for a day to do the wood work. You'll be amazed at how easily your old cabinets can be transformed into something new and beautiful!

Coming up in Part 3 - The Brickpaver Backsplash

{Did you miss Part 1 of Transformation of a Cottage Kitchen?: Check out Part 1: Adding Windows and French Doors

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