Our DIY Kitchen Remodel-Week 2

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Well, it looks like I will not be cooking in the kitchen this week! This is Week 2 of our DIY kitchen remodel, and it is coming along great so far. Remember, we have received all of our training from University of Google and YouTube. You can see our plans for the kitchen and our inspiration photos on Our DIY Kitchen Remodel Inspiration Week One.

Last week, we removed the cabinet doors and prepped the cabinets for the paint. We painted the cabinet bases with a brush and roller. I have a paint sprayer and I was planning on covering everything with plastic and spray painted the bases. My voice of reason (husband) told me that I was definitely not spray painting the bases in the house. I was still hoping to but when the guy at the paint store said that I should definitely not spray paint the bases in the house, I accepted it. I realize now that it would have been a disaster. I will go ahead and say that painting kitchen cabinets are not a weekend project. It always takes us 2 or 3 weekends because you need to let your paint dry really well between coats. We have painted cabinets at our beach house, lake house, and 2 times in our kitchen so I have some tips that will make painting kitchen cabinets easier that I will be sharing after we get the doors and cabinet hardware installed.

I used my HomeRight paint sprayer and shelter to spray paint the doors. These two items made this project so much easier, and I am mad at myself for not using these projects sooner. The shelter really does keep all the paint inside the tent plus I did not have to worry about bugs and grass getting on our fresh paint. This tent comes in handy when I spray paint smaller items also. In fact, I keep it set up in my garage and drag it outside often.

We spray painted two coats on one side of the doors on Friday and two coats on the other side on Sunday.  I have 20 cabinet doors of different sizes, and we were able to get two coats on all doors in a less than 2 hours with the sprayer. We did have a system going with one of us spraying and the other taking the doors back and forth. Tutorial coming soon!

We also removed the tumbled marble backsplash this weekend. We paid $1000 to have this backsplash installed 12 years ago. Now that we have tiled our shower and few other tiled projects, we could kick ourselves for paying that much money to have it done. Tiling is one of our favorite projects to do, and we have found that it is not hard. We did purchase a wet saw from an estate sale that makes tiling easier. We removed all of the electrical plates and cut off the power in the kitchen. We also recruited our teenage son to help us and this project went surprisingly fast.

The man installed the tumbled marble directly on top of the old Formica which really helped us to remove them. We did not have to worry about damaging the walls underneath excpt in one small area.

I don’t know why but all three of us love to demo! It’s putting everything back together that gives us the trouble.

While we do enjoy demo, we hate sanding.  I decided that this would be a good project that I can do by myself while my husband was at work. The cement left on the walls was very rough so I sanded them down several times to make the wall smooth. The tiles that we are adding are peel & stick glass subway tiles from a company that I am working with. I wanted the walls smooth so that the tiles will go onto the wall correctly.

I cleaned up all the mess, and now we are ready for this week’s projects. We are removing the old sink because the farmhouse sink came in yesterday. We are removing the granite countertop that weighs a ton, and we are still wondering how we are going to do this. Today, are building a box for the sink to set on. We have been researching YouTube to learn how to cut out the cabinet and build the frame for the sink. The countertop installers are coming to measure on Tuesday. The most exciting thing is happening on Monday! We are going to install the zinc onto our farmhouse table that we built. I may be staining the table legs too. Be sure to follow me on Instagram to see my Instagram stories @savvyapron. Don’t forget to check out week one of the remodel here.