Kitchen Remodel Finished.

The remodeling of the kitchen is finally finished.  It only took about two and a half weeks to complete, which is pretty good considering all the things that were wrong in the kitchen.  The primer that I used for the walls was Kilz 2, which in my experience is one of the best primers out there.  I used Color Place 10831, Airy Himalayan Poppy for the walls and Color Place 10795 Dusty Powder Blue for the cabinets and woodwork. I wanted to have some contrast in the kitchen to make it interesting.  Since the walls and cabinets were painted in an apricot color I had to use two coats of primer and paint to cover the color completely.  The apricot was bleeding through really bad, therefore I ended up using more paint than I wanted to.

I decided to keep the wood floor that was in the kitchen, and gave it a good cleaning so it would look almost new.  I also kept the cabinets and worked them over to get them looking newer.  I used USG Mud to fill in the holes and gaps that were in the cabinets and on the doors, as well as the drawers.  After I completed that, I used a hand sander with 220 grit sandpaper to give it a smooth appearance to paint over.

I replaced the old moldy kitchen sink with a stainless steel one, which in my opinion hides the scratches a lot better than the porcelain ones.  The trick to installing a new sink is to make a pattern.  Trace the sink on a large piece of cardboard and cut it out.  Place the cutout where you want your sink to be and trace around it.    Then you will want to use hole saws to cut into the corners with.  Once you have cut out the four corners, you use a jigsaw to cut the rest out.  You will then want to take a sand block and smooth out the rough spots.    Once you have completed all of that it is time to test fit your sink.  It should drop right in and be clamped in place.

A dishwasher was also installed, and in order to do that, one of the cabinets had to be taken out, which wasn't that hard.  The hard part was moving the framework for the drawers over.      After putting the framework in the new spot, a couple of supports had to be built to make them sturdier. I also decided that I wanted a garbage disposal installed as well since we were installing some new pipe for the dishwasher.

I also picked out new counter tops for the cabinets.  I decided to go with a prefabbed counter, as I had no prior experience in using Formica.  The only thing that I really know about using Formica, is that when you put it down on the glue you had better be sure that is where you want it as you can't move once it has touched the glue.  The hardest part with the counters was getting the 45 degree angles to match.  In order to make them fit together nicely, a little bit had to be sanded off at a time on each one.  After a lot of sanding the counters finally fit and it was time to clamp them down.

Once everything was in place, it was time to use silicon to seal up any cracks. We used a clear and a white silicon.  The clear was used for the counters and the the while was used for where the counter meets the wall.