the kitchen of our dreams - phase 1

On Monday, I shared with you the vanity that I transformed with gel stain.  I did the same thing with our kitchen cabinets, and I am in L.O.V.E.

Just like in the bathroom, our kitchen was all builder-grade oak, and it was not my favorite thing in the world.  To get the full scoop on how to use the gel stain, check out the tutorial here.  Here are some pictures of the process, starting with the old cabinets.  They were in really good shape, and they were not horrible by any stretch of the imagination, but just not our cup of tea.

 First, I started on the top cabinets, which if I could go back in time, I would have done all the cabinets at the same time and just taken a few days to get it done.  But, overall the process took me about a week and a half, so not too bad.  I removed the doors and shelves that were in the way of where I needed to stain, and sanded everything as I removed them.

I just kept each cabinet's screws in their respective cabinet.

Then, went on the first coat. 

I failed at taking pictures, apparently, so this picture shows the top cabinets with all three coats, and the bottom with the first coat.  I had the most luck when I was staining with a foam brush, rather than a rag.

P.S. If you're curious why that one cabinet is still oak, it's because we plan to take it down and replace it with actual open shelving.  Didn't feel like wasting any gel stain on that guy. This is coat 2 on the bottom.

Are you ready to see how beautiful this turned out?! I actually cried tears of joy the night the poly dried, and we put all the doors back on, with hardware.

Well, hello there, beautiful new hardware.

And, of course we need some beautiful before and afters that you can pin, since you love me! :)

So, how much did phase 1 of the kitchen makeover cost us?  Well, for about $56, we purchased the gel stain and poly. Keep in mind, we did all these cabinets, the bathroom vanity, and the banister (which I will be sharing soon), with just this quart of stain, and about 1/3 of the quart of poly.

Then, we purchased these special buy packs with 6 of the door handles for $12.88, so just the handles we used in the kitchen were about $30.  The extra pack is for the other bathrooms.

The cup pulls were the most expensive, but we love the impact.  At $5 each, we spent $45 on our drawer hardware.

So, for about $130.00, we made a huge change to our kitchen, and I'd like to think (and hope!) that we added value to the house by upgrading them from the builder-grade oak.  We also plan to have a few more phases that include adding the open shelving, updating the floors, updating the counters, and someday, *hopefully* updating the appliances.

Update: Check out the new open shelving here.

I hope you love this transformation as much as we do, because we are absolutely ecstatic.  We are one step closer to the kitchen of our dreams, and it was so easy, and pretty stinkin' affordable.