Kitchen facelift and a giveaway winner

First things first, Mr. Random has chosen a winner for the EZ Dresden Ruler giveaway!

Congrats Michelle!  I'll be emailing you for your information to get you your Dresden Ruler!

And secondly, after what feels like forever (in actuality, about 3 months), our "kitchen facelift" has finally come to an end!

We are just thrilled with how everything has come together, and are very much enjoying our more modern updated looking kitchen.  Just for reference, here is what we started with:

And here's where we ended:

As you may remember, our project started with deciding to paint the cabinets.  Here is the post which detailed our process and a few great links we found very helpful during the process.  Believe you me, while we (well, more me, than the hubs, he more just goes along with my crazy ideas) are always up for a DIY project, we are definitely not professional painters, and certainly have never done anything like this before.  It took a good bit of time and patience, but the results really were great (and quite inexpensive when compared to having someone else resurface them).  

The biggest expense of our project was by far the new coutertops.  Really, that's where the entire facelift idea started, and it sort of just snowballed from there.  We replaced our builder grade formica coutertops with granite.  I think the color is called Imperial Coffee, and in person, it reads more like a dark grey, with bits of dark grey, some browns, and almost a quartz-y reflective sort of stone that makes them quite pretty, if I do say so myself.

We updated the sink and faucet, and also installed a new over the stove mount microwave, which saves so. much. counterspace.  Seriously, I don't know why we didn't do this the minute we moved in.

Our last and final project, really was sort of a last minute decision to do ourselves.  We were planning on hiring someone to do the backsplash, but after taking forever to decide on what we wanted, it wasn't going to be finished for when we wanted it done (and it was way more expensive than we had thought it would be!) Soooo...whats any DIY-er to do?  Do it ourselves!

We had even less experience doing any sort of tiling than experience painting cabinets, but it was surprisingly easy.  We picked tiny 3/4" glass square tiles that came on 1 square foot sheets, which made installing it a breeze.  Because the tiles were so small, we could simply cut the sheets, and didn't need a tile cutter for fitting around the outlets and window.  Double bonus that we did it for less than half than the estimate the pro's gave us, and that was including using a more expensive tile than the tile in the pro's quote. 

When all was said and done, this took the better part of a Saturday morning and afternoon for the hubs and I to install the mortar and tile, and then maybe 3 or 4 hours to finish the grout a few days later. 

We are just thrilled with the way the kitchen has come together, and its even better knowing we did so much of it ourselves!  Were taking a breather from home improvement projects for a little while, but I still have my dining room re-do idea on the brain, and after tackling painting the cabinets, I may have just enough courage to tackle painting the dining room furniture!