A New Kitchen

For Christmas this year we decided to make the boys a kitchen set.  It seems to be the thing they both love to play with wherever they go, so we went for it.  After scouring the internet for hours trying to find inspiration we came across this amazing kitchen set.  It wasn't girly and we LOVED the details!  So, we found an entertainment center on Craigslist for free, yes FREE, and started making our list of materials that we would need.  We took lots of ideas from our inspiration kitchen set because it was done so well.  But we really tried to put our own twist on it too.  Hope you enjoy the pictures of our journey.  We started this on Saturday, December 17 and "finished" it on Friday, December 23rd.  Just in time for Christmas but not completely finished.  We had plenty of mishaps along the way :)

Here is the very UGLY entertainment center before we did anything to it.

The plan was to do two coats of primer, two coats of paint and one coat of poly.  After researching painting laminate online, we bought some KILZ Complete Oil-Based Primer.  We used some leftover paint from our kitchen.  We thought that was kind of cute that their kitchen would be the same color as ours.

See if definitely needs another coat of primer!

Me staining the wainscot in a beautiful gray

 Here's a picture of it after three (YES THREE) coats of primer!  Only two coats did NOT cut it.  Ugggggghhhhhh!  That was not a fun thing to do three times.  Primer is really stinky.  

Beautiful... you can't see the ugly laminate anywhere!!!

We picked up most of the accessories at IKEA.  This idea came from our inspiration piece.  We got the pan rack, s-hooks, faucet, knobs, burners, felt food, utensils, timer and dishes from there.  I had the canister and the oven rack laying around the house. The boys got some wooden food for Christmas from my parents too!

The "finished" product.

Close up of the sink and stovetop.

The lower half (fridge, shelves and oven).

The side pantry.

We still plan to add an oven door, fridge door and freezer door.  We need to add some shelves in the fridge and more... we just ran out of time.  Like I said we started a week before Christmas (we're nuts!)

Hopefully we've inspired you to do something fun like this too.  We had plenty of mishaps during the week; chipping paint, cracking paint, having to totally change what we were planning to do because our original ideas were NOT so great when put into action.  It was a fun experience for us to do together.  

Have you ever done something like this?

Megan