painted white PART 1 - DREAM BIG planning

White cabinets are all the rage these days. You have oak or alder cabinets so you're going to slap a coat of white paint on them and everything will be dandy, right?

Not so fast. 

There are SO MANY things to consider when it comes to a kitchen makeover or remodel. We've all heard the concept of good, better, best. While just painting your cabinets might be a GOOD idea, you might get a BETTER result by spending just a few more hundred dollars and thinking outside the box just a little. 

The very FIRST thing you should do is dream big. Think about the things you would do if money were no object. Would you add cabinets? Move appliances? Change countertops? Add additional lighting? Change hardware? 

I suggest writing out a list of everything you'd want in your wildest dreams. Also, make a rough sketch of how it will look. DREAM BIG people! 

You don't need to be an architect or even an artist to do this.  If you can draw a box, you can make a sketch of what you want. 

Before our kitchen ever materialized, these are the drawings we sketched out.  My husband later added heights and dimensions but this is where it all began.

Once you've written everything you want, decide which things are totally impractical due to floorplan, budget, space and circumstance. For example, I would LOVE a breakfast nook just off my kitchen.  I have a bay window/door but it hardly qualifies as a nook, more like a notch. Part of my dream big plans included a nook. To do this, we would have had to change the whole exterior of the house, add a new roof, move windows and change the flooring all for a 50 square foot increase. The cost vs value just wasn't there - so we nixed it. 

The question is: Is merely painting your cabinets white (or any color for that matter) going to help you achieve any of the changes on your DREAM BIG list?

If the answer is no, then you probably have some work to do before paint ever meets your cabinets. I know people think that they'll just paint their cabinets until they can get what they really want - and that's fine, I guess.  But why not start on what it is that you really want? You probably won't get an instant makeover.  I didn't. I got a nearly 4 year project but the 4 years passed regardless and now I have almost everything on the list of things I really wanted. 

I KNEW I wanted to move the fridge and the microwave. We moved a bank of cabinets where the fridge was going to go and had an electrician and plumber come rewire everything and voila, it was moved.  I believe the plumber and electrician cost around $250 TOTAL.

We moved the bank of cabinets we took out to accommodate the fridge over to where the fridge used to be.

I knew I wanted the cabinets extended up to the ceiling so we took the cabinets that were above the fridge and moved them to the top of the existing cabinets.

I can't tell you for how many months I lived with my kitchen like this. I'd like to pay honorable mention to the section of cabinets that don't have a countertop. Also the fact that I didn't have a microwave for WEEKS, oh and the flooring and the cabinets still look SO AWESOME together.

Up next: painted white PART 2: moved and measured.