Kitchen Makeover: Before

Updated on August 14, 2024

Kitchen Makeover: Before. This is the before of our kitchen before any home improvements. We have a lot of work to do to create a kitchen that we will love.

A little preface … lately, I have been feeling sort of all “Oh, woe is me!” about my house.

We bought our house over five years ago. I guess in the back of my mind, I thought we would be moving on to bigger and better things by now.

Don’t get me wrong. I am incredibly grateful to be a homeowner. I love that we can do whatever we want to this house and that we are not making someone richer by paying their mortgage for them. Yet, in my mind, I always figured we would be living somewhere else by now.

My house is not small, but two kids and a dog later, we are slowly but surely outgrowing it.

The other issue is that it is a manufactured home. That is not bad in and of itself, but manufactured homes do tend to depreciate in value. And with the housing market being in the toilet, I have a feeling we are going to be here much longer than we first anticipated.

(Fast forward to 2019 … we ended up in our first house for 13 years!)

Instead, I am trying to adopt a much happier, healthier attitude about the whole thing. I might as well love where I am living right now, right? So, I am going to start making some home improvements. Let’s start with the kitchen!

Kitchen Makeover: The Before

Here is the kitchen in all its glory right now. I did not even pick up. I want you all to see it how it normally looks. Even the kitty trying to climb the cabinet is a daily occurrence around here.

Here are a few more views of how our kitchen looks now:

Okay, and here is the hideous “wallpaper” (and I use that term lightly) that I have been staring at for five years. I know, I know – why the heck didn’t we fix this before, right?

The Walls

For some reason, this is one of the few rooms in our house that was never taped and textured. The texturing is beyond my ability, but I can handle the taping.

For those of you who have never been in a manufactured home, they usually have these pre-wallpapered/patterned panels that are used in place of regular drywall.

Then, the seams are covered with small flat strips of painted wood. So far, we have managed to pull all those down to be left with this.

And here, you can see the unfinished corners.

We have to cover the ugly seams with joint tape and compound before we can prime and paint.