Decorating Disasters - My Kitchen Nightmare!

Four years ago I found myself searching for that perfect house to buy. Our last home was an older house and I promised myself that we weren't going to go there again. I wanted a newer home, something I wasn't going to have to fix up or do much work on. Well, that didn't work out at all. We ended up purchasing another old home. It was two blocks from the school, in a great neighborhood and had everything we were looking for.

So once again I found myself needing to redecorate. I was not fond of the kitchen as it was. We didn't have the money to purchase new cabinets, etc that it would take to redo the kitchen. I decided we'd put in hardwood flooring, paint the kitchen, paint the cabinets and change the hardware and that would have to do for now. This was supposed to be a simple project that we could finish in a weekend. Well, it took far more than a weekend to do and I wasn't happy about it at all.

We got the kitchen painted and moved on to the cabinets. We had no idea what we were about to get into. The people who lived here before us had painted over all the hinges when they painted the cabinets. So, instead of it taking us a short amount of time to get the cabinet doors off it took us a long time. And once we pulled the doors off we realized that there were marks that we weren't going to be able to remove on the doors and the cabinets from the hinges. I didn't particularly like the hinges and handles that were on the cabinets before so I was determined to make it work so that I could buy new ones. What a joke that was!

Here I was with a color that I loved on my walls and the cabinets painted and all I wanted to do was to put my doors back on. Well, since the people had painted over the hinges we had to match up the holes and find a big enough hinge to cover the marks that were left. Shopping for those hinges were a nightmare! Nothing and I mean nothing would match up. Someone then suggests that we just put the old hinges back on. I was tempted to do this because I just wanted my kitchen put back together. However, we had already thrown the old hinges away and the trash had already been picked up. So back to Lowes we went and realized that we were going to have to buy the same hinges we had before, just a different color. I wasn't happy at all about this. Of course Lowes didn't have enough and neither did the Lowes in the next town over. My husband's parent's had to end up shipping us the hinges from IL. Once again I was stuck waiting to wrap up my weekend project.

The story gets even better! I was happy that I had the hinges, even though they weren't what I had wanted because now I could put my doors back on, right? Wrong! The hinges matched the holes, but they were not exactly the right size. They covered up all the marks that were left from pulling off the old hinges, but they wouldn't connect to both the cabinet and the door. I was so frustrated by this point. I was seriously looking into purchasing new cabinets. My husband's stepfather finally came up with a solution for us. We had to take three very small rings (I can't remember the correct term for them now) and put them behind each screw as we screwed them into the cabinets. Yeah, that was real fun. I was fuming at this point, but all I wanted was my kitchen put back together so I had to suck it up and start screwing...the nails that is!