31 Days of Before & After ~ Day 23 “Corrected & Completed”

Years.

It’s been years.

Many years that I had planned to do something with this eyesore.

Back up. It wasn’t always an eyesore, but it became one when I began experimenting and then walked away from the project and never finished.
Now you know my secret. Thus the reason for me taking this 31 Days of Change challenge. I needed a cattle prod of sorts to motivate me and get some things done around my house. Some things; “it takes a village” for me “it takes a challenge, deadline and accountability” to set my course. So in a way, you all are my village!

My pantry has been the thorn in my side for years…literally a very small corner of my kitchen. It never has been functional and we even expanded our laundry room and added shelving units so we could have a decent pantry. But for years, when my oldest kids were younger and we had 5 children living in this humble abode, this was what we used for a pantry.

When we first moved into our home in 1986 the walls were wall papered and these doors matched the lower cabinets in the photo. I stripped the wallpaper a few years ago, painted an did the border thing. But even that was too much wallpaper for me. However, I have wanted to redo the cabinets for awhile and because I’m a big chicken, I tested my painting abilities, or lack of them I should say, on these poor pantry doors. I experimented with three different paints, and distressed and pretty much left it and never finished.

Until this challenge…

you see I do have dreams, they just sometimes take a loooong time to become reality.

I got the kitchen and dining room walls mudded last Sunday. Curious? you can read about that here.

that in itself made these doors look better,

but I had another direction that I wanted to go with this little corner of my world.

I’ve been contemplating painting my kitchen cabinets…

but what color? Light? Dark? Distress? No distress?

STRESS!!!!

To build confidence in my much improved painting abilities,

I’ve painted several smaller things this month in an attempt to find a color that I can live with.

Once I paint these cabinets, they may stay that way for a long time. I really want to love the color.

I came back to the old testing grounds and came up with this…

Well it is different… yes?

I used the Annie Sloan Chalk Paint in Graphite

Do I love it?

It’s taken me a week to like it…love? Not yet.

But I knew that I wasn’t finished with this project. I had more plans for it.

I can tell you that I probably will not be painting all of my cabs this color, but there is one more area that will receive this rich dark color….that is to be revealed before this challenge is over.

Are you ready for this reveal?

here ya go…

message central and kid friendly…well grand kid friendly 🙂

this is finally a functional area of my kitchen

if and when this grows old I will move onto plan “H” (passed plan B along time ago) which would be to remove this unit completely and put in shelves and a door…that’s my fall back plan, but for now this will do fine.

Now it’s time to go shopping for dinner…I’m making stuffed shells! Yum!