Kitchen Fongzjway

As you know from our previous post, I've started to work a bit on the kitchen. Andrea and I find ourselves spending a lot of time together in there (there's always food to prepare or dishes to wash). In the beginning, I dreamt big ideas for a total kitchen makeover once we hit the lottery. Well, the lottery may or may not happen but I just finally had to do something about it because it was just irritating to look around and see ugliness, clumsiness and craziness at ever turn.


Something had to be done NOW. But with only a few bucks to work with, I had to come up with ideas based on what already had been done over the past 6 months and possibly throw in one new challenge.

I thought I'd start with the set of cabinets on the wall that seemed to scream, "tear me down now." Demolition and tearing down anything ALWAYS equals $$, I've learned, so I thought I'd take a look at how sound the cabinets were and if they could be salvaged. Turns out they are made of all wood and very, very sturdy. Why not strip the old layers of paint? Why is one cabinet jutting into the hallway defying the word "Feng Shui" with extreme prejudice? What is the sink doing directly under a cabinet and not next to the window?? This is usually how my train of thought goes when I start a project but I have to stay focused and take it one step at a time. I decided that the previous owners of the house practiced "Fongzjway", a nonsensical word that doesn't even exist on Google. (click on images to enlarge)


After stripping the paint and gently cutting around the weird cabinet, I repaired the new cabinet openings and removed the doors to get a more open feeling. I tried to understand why people put doors on cabinets anyway, except maybe to keep dishes from falling in the event of an earthquake. Well these doors were not going to help in that department anyway. So we'll try the 'open cabinet' look until we find the exact size cabinet doors.


We had plenty of sample paints leftover from our bathroom redo and we both really like the whole glazing/marble/distressed approach to painting for a Victorian. So I re-glazed the cabinets and added a new crown. I installed individually, unique handle pulls from Urban Ore for about .20 cents a piece. There was that dang tilebord stuff used as a backsplash that you would hardly notice so I glazed it with red wine paint leftover from my office painting. Add in a few other decorative touches and thus begins a slow process of transforming the ugly kitchen into something a bit more interesting. The whole job took about a week and less than $100.