Front Door Facelift

This post has been a long time in the making. As you can see in the photos above, the front doors on our house were in pretty sad shape on the outside, and very golden on the inside. We wanted to do something about that for quite a while, but replacing them would be very expensive and refinishing them would be very unpleasant, so for a long time we did nothing. That changed in March of 2015 when I finally pulled the doors off the hinges and started sanding.

Kitchen Construction Conclusion (Part 9)

Before - This is the photo from the listing when we bought the house.

Our kitchen renovation is finally complete! This post will be a summary of everything we've done to the kitchen since buying the house, along with a cost breakdown of the recent major renovation.

Kitchen Construction, Part 8 - Coating Cabinets

Before

The final step in our kitchen renovation was revamping the cabinets. They were covered in the original 70's lacquer and were showing their age. It didn't help that the cabinets had no handles, so they've been touched by dirty hands for the past ~40 years.

Since the cabinets themselves were in relatively good shape, and we didn't want to spend a fortune, we decided to just paint them and add new hardware. It took quite a bit of doing, but they came out very nicely.

Kitchen Construction, Part 7 - One Wonderful Window

Before

Most of the windows in our house are the original black (why?) aluminum, single pane units from the late 70's, including the kitchen window. They also have no frames or real sills of any kind, making them look pretty sad. However, they still function acceptably as windows, so it's hard to justify replacing them, especially here in temperate SoCal where the insulating properties of double pane windows aren't so important.
Since we were updating everything else in the kitchen, we figured we should go ahead and replace that window now.

Kitchen Construction, Part 6 - Fabulous Flooring

Before

Our kitchen had terrible tile floors. It was a crappy design with a super glossy finish that showed every speck of dirt. It had to go.