If you’ve been following along in our retro ranch reno you know that the kitchen that we started with was pretty bad. 
We tore it out and replaced it with cabinets that we scored on Craigslist. They worked really well, but left our fridge looking lonely and out of place.
So we hired a cabinet maker to build us a cabinet for over the fridge! He also built us a surround for the island. This is the part of the post where you wood purists can stop reading.
Seriously. Don’t read any further.
Yes, I had him make the cabinets in “paint grade” wood. When I realized all of the places that we would be adding new wood I discovered how hard it was going to be get it stained to match the 25 year old Craigslist cabinets. It was also cheaper and easier. Now the wood purists can shun me forever for painting wood cabinets. (Although they’re not supposed to be reading this far).
Over on the other side of the kitchen he also did some work, like building up our bench and adding a toe kick that would allow the heat and air to vent out.
He also added a simple modern molding to tie all the cabinets together.
Typically Matt and I try to DIY everything, saving money wherever we can. This is one job that I am happy we hired out. He did an excellent job of making the island side panels look like they were original to the cabinets. All in all we spent $1000 for the Craigslist cabinets, and then another $1000 for the cabinet maker. That $2,000 also included the HUGE Pantry, the bench, the island, and the desk/china hutch. We also put one of the cabinets in our laundry room and another in our garage!
The cabinet above the fridge also looks exactly like all the other cabinets. I love that our fridge no longer looks like it’s floating lonely on the side of the kitchen.
In case any of you wood purists are still reading, I’ll justify one more reason why I *Have* to paint the cabinets… can you see those rings behind the new knobs? That just wasn’t going to fly to leave exposed.
So now I need your help! The decision has been made to paint the cabinets, but I really am not sure what color! I painted the cabinets white in our first North Dakota house, and in our last house, and would really love to do something different this time. I did really LOVE the look of our tuxedo kitchen, and am considering something similar. If you check out my kitchen Pinterest board you can see I’ve really been swooning over cabinets with green tones in them.
Maybe I’ll just paint the island a different color? Hopefully I’ll be back next week to post our finished painted cabinets and share my decision… now i just need to go and make one!
