Getting Started

I bought my first can of pink paint. Not having had daughters, I never expected to paint anything in the house pink. I've decided to add pink accents to my china closet and spice shelves. Here's a before photo.

The china cabinet without the doors. You can see how the spice shelves abut the side of the cabinet.

One of the things I loved about this house was the built in's. We've got the china cabinet and beside it small shelves just the right size for spices. Until a few weeks ago, the spice shelves included doors that I abhorred. They were obviously added on at some date well after the house was built. One morning I got out the hammer and the screw driver and took them off. Unfortunately, whoever added the doors also added a piece of wood to the original shelves. That had to go as well. As you can see by the photo below, when I removed the extra wood, quite a bit of the wall paint was also removed. 

Here are the spice shelves after the doors have been removed. You can see the mucked up wall paint on the left. 

 A strange part of the kitchen can be seen below. This is a laundry shoot of sorts. I don't know who would use it as it would take me forever to trek to the kitchen with my laundry in a basket and then throw it through this little opening. I'm not really clear about the actual purpose of the opening but it goes directly into the basement near the washer. I guess I could throw my kitchen linens down there but I don't really see any other practical purpose. The cardboard laying on the top I scraped off the spice shelves. No so good looking.

The wacky laundry shoot. You can also see that they must have had to patch about 2 inches of flooring with that hideous metal strip. It gets so dirty back there because the strip catches everything. I don't know that we'll change the flooring right now but I'm thinking about it.

And finally, one of my pet peeves. I abhor that people paint right over their hardware. How hard is it to unscrew the little knob? Really people. Our china cabinet has wonderful glass knobs that now have hideous paint covering the metal and even part of the glass. Grrr. I am going to strip the hinges and the knobs.  I love the look of pristine hardware.

The hardware from the china cabinet. Don't you just love that glass knob?

So even though we're not totally sure about everything we want to change in the kitchen (including the counter top and sink) I just decided to do the cabinets a little at a time. I was able to sand, clean and get in one coat of pink. The pink is inside the china cabinet and on the back wall of the spice shelves. I'm really liking the way it looks. More photos to come.