Like the trim, the cabinets clashed with the newly painted walls.  However… there were a lot of cabinets!  If you begin, where do you end?  Then there were the countertops.  I really, really disliked the countertops.  I knew that at sometime, someone had paid a lot of money for those fancy edges, but let this be a warning to anyone who thinks it is worth the money.  That triple waterfall might look cool, but it isn’t.  It catches everything.  When we moved in I was impressed with the cleanliness of the home, but I had to use something sharp and thin to clean all of the accumulated gunk out of the “waterfall” – and I would have kept them just for the looks had they not been so brown.  It was depressing.

Why would you paint a ceiling brown?

So this project did not happen right away.  Painting began only when I couldn’t stand it any longer.  We had to save money for the countertops – do you know that island is 14 feet long? That’s a lot of counter!

I took this photo before we bought the house.  Mark loved the cabinets…

The cabinets were so intimidating – I finally bought some paint and did just enough work that there was no backing out!  Our kitchen looked like this for awhile…

Our kitchen was torn apart for a long time!  I have since become much more proficient at painting cabinets, but this project went on and on….

We painted the island a light gray.  By now we were so tired of working with our Sherwin Williams oil-based paint that we experimented with an alkyd paint from Home Depot.  It was better but now I stick with Advance paint from Benjamin Moore.  We also spray painted the hardware – it was very good quality but it was brown.  The island hardware became black and the rest of the kitchen hardware became pewter – all Rustoleum.