The last coat of paint has dried, the last door was hung, and the last SOS text to my parents has been sent—my kitchen cabinets are officially re-painted! (Well, I actually finished it last month but I’m finally getting around now to writing this post. Because, life.)

I moved into my condo three years ago in July, and thankfully, I liked all of the wall colors in the rooms. The only area I didn’t really like was the kitchen cabinets. As you can see below, the color was a super dark brown, and it just wasn’t my fave. After moving in, I had thought about re-painting them but never got around to it.

Until I watched a random episode of Home Town earlier this year and saw Ben and Erin re-do a kitchen with cream-colored upper cabinets and green-colored lower cabinets. I said to Josh, “I want to do that!!!” and then told my parents and then we were meeting at the Sherwin Williams in town to look at paint swatches.

I bought a can of primer, one gallon of Irish Cream, and one gallon of Green Onyx, and my dad supplied all of the necessary paint accessories—saw horses, paint brushes, Box of Rags, paint stirrers, can opener, etc. Said accessories were kept in our office (off the kitchen) for the duration of the painting, and it looked like we lived in the paint section at Home Depot.

Painting started in the middle of April, and I went section by section: the upper cabinets over the stove, lower cabinets by the stove, then upper cabinets over the sink, and lower cabinets by the sink. The process involved sanding everything, then two coats of primer and two coats of paint on the cabinet fronts and the doors. The dark brown was so dark that it required four total coats to fully cover it, which suuuucked.

I spent about four days a week working on the cabinets, either painting after work or on the weekend mornings for a few hours. The timing for this project ended up working out well since I’ve been working from home. If I was still going into work three days a week, there’s no way I’d want to work on this after coming home. It was actually something I looked forward to after work; I’d get set up right after logging off at 4:30 p.m. and listen to a podcast or music.

Josh did help a bit! The original plan was that he would help me with the cabinets, but with his work schedule, if I waited for him to get home, we’d be working on it at 8:00 p.m. (He works a much different schedule than I do.) There were a few times he was home and he helped with sanding and some priming. But for the most part, I did the majority of the work.

And drumroll… here are the official “after” photos! I finished everything up a few days before my condo-versary last month, and boy was it such a sigh of relief. Funny enough, I didn’t hate the knobs, so I put the old ones back on.

I’m incredibly proud of myself for tackling this project. I did about 90% of the work; Josh helped those few times, and my mom came over when I first started to help/figure out the process. It looks SO much better, and the space even seems bigger than it did before.