Kitchen Remodel Job!

A month ago, when Crystalie was out west visiting Ricki and family, we had decided I would start the process of remodeling our kitchen. I spent the first night she was gone tearing out the old trailer house cupboards, which were nothing more then particle board with contact paper, held in place by a similar wood frame, with shelves. As you can see in the above picture the panel board was out of the late 60's!
You can see things looked pretty ugly behind it all!

Another look at it with a look at the fridge space and also the pantry closet gone to the left of the stove. Also the stain glass lamp in the middle of the ceiling along with the old aluminum frame window. I also had to replace numerous ceiling tiles before placing the new old cupboards.

 After I cleaned up the floor I placed the cupboard base stands, and positioned them to begin the addition of the new-used cupboards. I have to thank my sister Valerie and her Mike, for the cupboards, we are installing, they were remodeling their house and I took a day and removed them from their house and hauled them home. Saving them the expense of having a contractor removing them.
 Here you can see I placed the large corner unit with turning shelves in it, along with the sink unit, and a 4 drawer unit next to the stove, and next to the fridge, I placed in a small space to fit in the pan shelf unit, which we converted with two pull out units for various kitchen items like tin foil and wax paper roll products, along with our plastic baggy boxes.
 5 days after Crystalie left, my daughter Jennifer, came over and assisted me with putting in the 4 upper cabinet units and also the pantry unit. You can see the small cupboard above the fridge and the corner cabinet in this photo.
 This picture shows you the pantry unit and the stove with the pantry cupboard to the left of it, and also the small upper shelf unit. It started looking like a kitchen again!
 Jennifer also helped me place a 3/4 inch sheet of plywood over the base cupboards and also the cement board on top of that. where you can see I also have cut the sink hole. We received a brand new Kohler white heavy cast sink from a person I worked with and it probably weighted in at about 120 lbs and very awkward to handle.
 As you can see we got the sink in and later that day I got the water hooked up into the sink after Jennifer helped me get it in to position. It was a long day that Saturday and but with the help we got a lot done.
 The next step was to place our back-splash and also trim around the top of the cupboards and the ceiling. We went with a corrugated steel material for the back splash, you will notice it is not the shiny new metal. We actually distressed the metal by heating it with a large propane yard burning torch, which with the hot heat would burn off the silvery zinc finish giving us the dull flat gray look. The heat also was not consistent so it has various waves to it.
 You can see above that I had replaced the kitchen window with a much larger casement window, and I also created a garden area in between the window and the sink. We have about a 10 inch by 24 inch garden area in front of the sink. You can see in this picture, metal next to the stove which is on the back of the pantry cupboard unit. I also added shelves between the upper cupboards above the sink and also above the oven.
 The picture above shows the completed project, with the gray ceramic tiles, I installed on the cement board for our counter top. Please note the re-purposed outdoor porcelin green lamp hanging from the ceiling. also the shelves are decorated with a wide variety of our old treasures. Also you can see part of the open dish storage cupboard next to the fridge. I had to cut down the cupboard I placed there to fit the space, which meant the doors would not work, so we decided it was a nice way to showcase our Mexican Pottery dishes we use almost everyday.
 We swapped out our wood garbage box with an old galvanized box, with a hinged lid on it, below our paper towel holder, and you can also see the front of the pantry cupboard, which was also converted from an oven unit in my sister kitchen, I placed cupboard doors on it installed shelves in the center of the unit. The top cupboards and and the bottom drawer were part of the unit.
 You can see the counter a little better here, it is six inch tile with 3/16inch spacing and I cut the tiles with a small wet saw where I needed to. You can see the space in front of the sink and all the light we now have with the new window, and of course a better look at the galvanized back-splash.
Needless to say the improvement of these used cupboards compared to what we had is huge, and the new old look we envisioned look's great to us!

The last photo is of a cupboard unit I had build years ago, but we also included in the update by placing the galvanized metal on the bottom and also the back-splash area, plus installed the same tile we have on our counter top on it. Crystalie also repainted the window frame doors to a lighter gray instead of the forest green they were! It is all very nicely decorated, and is really tied in to the rest of the kitchen now.

It is always fun to update, things but even sweeter when you can re-purpose a nice set of oak front cupboards and also give it a retro look with all the galvanized steel, and also installing a nice accent tile counter! I know we will enjoy it for years!