My cousin, Emily and her husband recently updated their kitchen. I was so impressed with what they did I knew I had to share it with you.
They are renters, so there’s not a whole lot they can do with the space. In fact, the thing you see in the middle of the kitchen is her dishwasher. She has to move it to the sink and do some things to make it work, but they couldn’t install one, so this was the solution.
Here’s what their kitchen looked like before. She has done amazing things with this old house, even before they changed the kitchen. She has a gift for decorating and her husband is very handy with the tools and paint.
I’m going to let Emily tell you what they did from here.
This is the kitchen before (minus the hideous hardware)…my husband had already removed the hardware and started filing the holes before I realized I wanted to capture the before and after. This house was built in the 1950s and these are the original cabinets. They needed major updating and we did just that. The doors and drawers are plywood with no detail, trim work or routing. We decided to add trim to every door and drawer to make a more custom look. We used 3/8” screen mold on the doors to add a paneled look.
This was the start of my husband adding the trim to each cabinet door and drawer.
Next we decided on a paint color for the cabinets. I was sick of the white, not that I don’t like white kitchens, but mine looked more dingy than clean and I wanted to go for an entirely new look. We decided on black cabinet. Emily’s kitchen at Chatting at the Sky was my inspiration kitchen.
Now, I knew the black paint would NOT help my GREEN countertops look any better, so we decided to paint our Formica countertops using Whismies and WhatNots’ step by step instructions. But first, we had to get the cabinets painted, so we primed them using Kilz and had the lady at Lowes tint it a soft gray. 
I was apprehensive about going with black cabinets until i saw the primer go on. Just that color helped the look tremendously. I knew we were not going to regret going with black.
Once the primer dried, we started on the countertops. Here is the before in case you didn’t get a good enough look.
You can see we had this retro stainless steel edging that was hammered on. Lovely. My husband removed all the silver edging and he replaced it with a simple wood trim.
Once all trim was nailed on and holes were filled, I started with the paint. I used the Walmart craft acrylic paints for my base color as well as my accent colors. I started with a white craft paint and a taupe paint and mixed the two to create a soft beige. This went over the entire surface of my countertops. I let that dry for 24 hours and the next day I came back with three accent colors.
I was trying to create a faux granite look using three colors the darkest was “burnt umber” and the other two were combinations of the taupe and burnt umber to create a darker taupe and lighter taupe.
I started with the darkest, burnt umber and used a splatter technique. I dipped my 1” brush in the paint and flicked the end of it to splatter the surface. Once I was happy with the amount of dark splatters I moved on to the other colors. I mixed up enough paint of the darker and lighter taupe so that I wouldn’t run out halfway through and have to mix more. I added a Glaze to both taupes, You can get this from any paint store. Mine came from Sherwin Williams. I added equal parts glaze and paint.This glaze creates a transparency with your paint. So, instead of you covering up your base paint with a top paint you are able to see both colors.
I used a plastic Walmart sack to apply the two taupes. I wadded it up in my hand and dipped it into both paint colors and added to the countertops. My husband came behind me with a paper towel and helped blend the two colors together. In the end the faux finished looks more like a stained concrete than granite, but anything looked better that the fabulous green, so I was happy.
Now, this is Melissa again, I’m going to show you the after pictures. Get ready to be wowed.
Isn’t that amazing! What a transformation. Let’s look at what it looked like again.
I knew you’d love it!
Want a sneak peak into the rest of the house?
Looking from the kitchen into the living/dining room.
You can see she borrowed some of my turquoise paint for a few projects.
If you have any questions Emily will answer in the comments.
