The kitchen...urgh

So, let's not even talk about the kitchen. First off, the pictures make the before picture of the kitchen look way better than it actually did up close in person! The old sticky wood cupboards, yucky off white/yellow walls (which I think the previous owners were smokers in here and it is more like a smokers yellow paint color, yuck!) It just overall had the worst vibe ever. It totally depressed me walking through here every day and kind of made me regret buying this place! But at the end of the day, I bought it and the work must get done somehow!

I didn't waste any time ripping the kitchen apart, I think I lasted 20 minutes after walking in to it after getting my keys! So like I mentioned in my previous post, single person, everything is expensive, doing it all myself, blah blah blah...so everything I had planned to do for renos was on an EXTREME budget!!! 

My game plan was to completely upgrade the one side of my kitchen (the side with the sink), by buying Giani granite paint and Giani cabinet paint..it was well worth it and saved me A LOT of money in the end which was super important. The other side with the fridge and stove was going to be completely new everything so that's where I needed to keep my budget. After the first week of being moved in, I managed to finish painting the cupboards from ugly brown wood, to beautiful white. My boyfriend helped me drill holes in the cupboards to screw in the modern handles onto them ...and WOW, what a difference already! 

The following week I tried out the Giani granite paint and after spending hours painting the granite design on my counter top, I realized I liked it better when I had just used the black base paint that came in the kit..yup, you guessed it. I painted over all my hard work with the base paint then used the sealer to give me a gloss black finish. Then after hours and hours of looking online and at home depot multiple times for the perfect back splash, I finally saw the one I had envisioned in my mind at Lowes. Phiew, now that I got that out of the way ,now here's the fun part. Cutting small pieces of glass tile (Dave did this part of course), and placing them one by one took a lot of patience and meticulous work. Also grouting for my first time ever was not as much fun as I had anticipated! But overall, it turned out great! For the final touch, I found a beautiful modern chrome faucet while at Lowes that was really well priced and voila!

Here are the before and ALMOST not so after pic of the one side of my kitchen....