We pulled off our Kitchen Update On a Budget!

I've been talking about this for a while now and I finally have the pictures to post of the kitchen.  I think it's awesome and am excited to share on here.  We worked two weekends and assorted evenings to get it done, had a pause between paychecks so I could buy more backsplash, but all in all managed to get it all done and done on a budget.  Total spent was right around $700 to do the entire kitchen, including a $200 tile saw that I will use for other stuff so it shouldn't really count, right?

Anyway, I hated my kitchen.  It was boring and needed an update but I'm on a mission to get these bills paid off so we were really limited on what we could do.  We can't afford new appliances right now and if I had my way, I'd gut the whole thing but I digress....  Here's the before:

We *almost* caved and bought new countertops but it's not worth it for us to do it when the basic bones of the kitchen are different than those that I see in my dream kitchen.  I'm not buying granite twice. At $5000 or so to do it, we're not ready anyway.  So the first step was to paint/stain the cabinets.  Since the bathroom experiment with the Rustoleum stuff worked so well, we bought a box to get started.  We figured we'd need two because this looks like more than 40 linear feet to me but it turned out that we only needed ONE box.  $75 at home depot.  Awesome.  So the cabinet doors started coming off.  Man there's a lot of them.  Who knew?  And for a long while, things looked like this:

My hubby is a pretty good sport and he took the job of painting while I took the job of tiling.  We shared the job of swearing.  That's love.  We started to get an idea of what it was going to look like when I got the backsplash up and he had the fixed cabinets done with the first coat of the paint.  It looked not half bad!

But then I decided that I had to go with my vision of doing the whole wall in backsplash.  Not all of them - just the one behind the stove.  I think at it's tallest point it's 11 feet.  But I could see it in my mind and I knew it would look awesome.  That is the exact moment that I realized that we didn't have the cash to do it right that second.  And I pouted.  And I whined.  And Dave Ramsey repeated "not on credit" in my head over and over and over.  And so I waited until we got paid.  And then off to Home Depot we went... AGAIN.  I swear they know us by name by now.  But it was so worth it.  We also went to Lowes because they have better light fixtures....  And suddenly, it was DONE.  And I LOVE it.  We didn't pay someone too much to do it for us.  We did it ourselves.  And we did it together.  And that's awesome.  We pulled it off.  It's updated and it looks great and I love my backsplashed wall.  And it will keep me happy for a while while I save my pennies to gut the whole thing.  Someday...  You should see my plans for that...   :)

Here's the finished product: