Kitchen Week: Culled from submitted entries, the week-long series focus on five artists with extraordinary projects. For the first time ever, each artist and five readers are receiving prizes for their beautiful artworks. Look to the end for today’s sponsor and your chance to win! Our Kitchen Week continues with another old friend of Fauxology, Nashville-based Bella Tucker, owned by Dana and Brooks Tucker. They have a project full of moxie, creative ideas and finishes galore — the Before & After will excite you! Dana guides us through the project.
The kitchen makeover is our own kitchen. When we started, we had only been in our new house about two weeks. The house was built in 1985 and the main offenders were the popcorn ceiling, the soffits, short dark cabinets and outdated appliances. The kitchen also had very little light — it felt like a cave! Despite all the shortcomings, I knew the kitchen had a good footprint and would be a space we could work with.
We had a limited budget and about 2 weeks. The previous homeowners had invested in beautiful granite countertops and we didn’t want to the cabinets and risk cracking the beautiful granite, or replace the countertops with something like cambria quartz just for the sake of it. I scoured Pinterest looking for ANYONE who had worked with the existing cabinets and one idea I did found was a person who built a box around her soffit to extend the cabinet to the ceiling. I showed the photo to my contractor who had the idea to remove our soffits and extend the cabinets to the ceiling with plywood, inverted shoe molding and crown molding. They also removed the wall oven and installed two doors from the back of the island to create additional storage. We cut out the cook top and put in a double oven range.
Brooks and I tag teamed to paint the cabinets. We used Annie Sloan’s Chalk Paint in 50% Pure White and 50% French Linen to make the perfect gray. We painted the island in Annie Sloan Graphite. We framed in the new refrigerator and added a chalk board message board to the side.
Brooks skimmed the walls and then did a drip drag and roll aluminum metallic paint finish on the mail wall and back splash.We had an electrician come in and install nine can lights, two pendants from Overstock over the bar island and a capiz shell chandelier from West Elm.
At this point, we were only left with a popcorn ceiling. We thought we were going to go with a tin ceiling but it was going to cost us $1,500-$2,000. I knew there had to be a better way. I came across styrofoam tiles that look like tin. You cut the tiles with an exacto knife and they glue right up on top of the popcorn ceiling. They are also paintable if you would like to customize the color. For around $400 we had a beautiful custom ceiling!
One of the features we liked about the house was that it didn’t have a dining room. We never used ours in the old house and seemed like a waste of space. Our new house had a huge eat-in area that would seat 8-10 along with an extended island that could seat 4 bar stools. Perfect! We were literally painting cabinets at 10pm the night before our company arrived for Thanksgiving, pulling tape and stashing paint cans and trays in the laundry room! Thanksgiving was extra special spending it with our family, in our new home, in our personalized kitchen.
Talk about an incredible DIY transformation with a lot of vision! To read a more in-depth profile, Dana shared her own write-up on the Bella Tucker blog. Dana and Brooks are based in Nashville, TN, and run Bella Tucker together. They also share current projects and ideas via their Facebook page, boards on Pinterest.