Only four weeks to go! I can't believe we're already reached the halfway point of this round of the One Room Challenge. We're so close to being finished, yet still have so much to do! This week wasn't as eventful as I'd hoped. We're STILL waiting on the solid surfacing adhesive to ship and won't have countertops until it does, which is a bummer. I don't even know when it's expected ship - just crossing my fingers it's sometime in the next week or we might be in trouble! Let's focus on what we have accomplished though, shall we?
One of the major changes I made to the design of our kitchen was removing the wall oven/micro and cooktop replacing them with a Samsung range. In doing so, we had to remove the old countertops, which weren't in great shape anyways, and reconfigure the cabinets to make room for the range to sit under the hood vent. Last week I talked about the range hood and open shelving, but before we could do either of those projects, we first had to rearrange the cabinets and add to the subway tile backsplash where the oven/micro and wall cabinet used to be.
You can see in the photo above that we were left with a row of tile that had been cut to fit around what was there before, so that had to be removed prior to being able to add the new tile. I also wanted to move away from the black grout because I was wanting something softer, so I picked out a light beige-y colored grout and then had it color matched in chalk paint to cover the black grout that was left on the rest of the backsplash. Apparently, they were able to find the code for the grout color at Menard's, so the finished result is pretty seamless.
Painting the grout was as much of a pain as you can imagine! I used a small paint brush and painted every single line with Zinsser BIN primer first, which is formulated for concrete. Then I went back over everything with the chalk paint - TWICE - because it's supposed to mimic the look of grout. Actually, I'm still not quite finished yet. I have a small portion to go, but I'm hoping to wrap it up this week!
Another major aspect of the project we pulled off was making and replacing the cabinet doors and designing/manufacturing our own hardware for them. The cabinets were stock from Lowe's and they just weren't holding up that well. They had dings and scratches and the joints on the faces of the sink cabinet doors had swelled from getting wet. We looked into buying replacement doors online, but to replace them all with unfinished MDF that I'd then have to paint was going to be close to $500! So we bought two $27 sheets of MDF and a few $20 rolls of wooden edge banding and made them ourselves!
For the island, I decided to do something different than the flat panel doors we put on both the upper and lower cabinets along the wall. I was very tempted to use quarter inch paneling and attach half rounds to create a fluted look similar to the range hood. However, my husband suggested using the same MDF as the flat panel doors, but running it through the table saw to create a fluted effect. It was a bit time consuming cutting edge banding out of the grooves along the top and bottom of each piece, but so worth it!
Lastly, we installed the new pulls my husband machined for the flat panel doors. Since we removed the drawers and opted for cabinet doors only, I wanted all of the pulls to have the same look. We achieved this by making a circular shaped pull for the single cabinet doors to mimic the way the half circle pulls look side by side when installed on the cabinets with double doors. Initially we planned to use brass, but it was going to be pretty pricey. So when Derek suggested using wood instead, which I hadn't thought of, I wasn't sure at first. I'm super stoked over how they turned out though!
So what do you think? Next week is gonna be allllll about the the changes we made to the island and hopefully I'll have gotten the doors painted and installed by then so I can share a little sneak peak before the reveal July 1st! Until then, make sure to check out the other ORC participants and if you want to read my previous posts about this project, you can find them here:
Also, thanks again to my wonderful sponsors: Hudson Valley Lighting, Mitzi Lighting, Formica, Samsung, TIPTOE, and Winnoby.
