Kitchen Remodel: A love affair with Gel Stain.

I blame it on the Home Depot commercials, Pinterest, and an excellent tutorial from my friend Amy. Sometimes being fearless has some perks, we decided to stain all the kitchen cabinets. Our cabinets were the contractor grade oak, and the kitchen was just an orange explosion. The kitchen is my favorite room in the house, and orange just isn't in my color wheel. I followed this tutorial and got to work. Do NOT substitute the gel stain. With San Antonio being a big city there is a Woodcraft store pretty close to us. I know you can get it on Amazon as well. I wanted more of a custom color than they had. The Java color is a gorgeous brown, but I wanted a little red in there as well. I made a custom mix of a quart of Georgian Cherry to 1/2 pint of Java. The Georgian Cherry is pretty bold and I wanted to make it a little darker and rich. I started in the guest bathroom, that way if I ruined it we could just close the door. (sorry guests!) One of the best perks of the gel stain is minimal sanding and you can use it over the plastic-y laminate siding on the sides.

The biggest drawback was the humidity in San Antonio. Each door had to be stained on each side 2-3x and I had to wait 24hrs for it to be completely dry. Since summers here are pretty hot I cleared out the kitchen and made it my workshop. Complete with A/C and awesome fans.

After the guest bathroom turned out so good, we decided to go for it. We literally stained every last piece of wood in our house.

I love it!! It turned out better than I could have hoped. I also remade a table and chairs we found on craigslist. The backsplash was the easiest part. I used 1,2,3 Primer to prep the orange tile backsplash and then I painted it with Behr Premium Ultra paint in Polar Bear. It was so fast! 30min project.

First coat panic... 

During

Guest Bathroom Finished! 

Priming the backsplash

You would never guess this was laminate wood. 

Before and After on the Kitchen Table and Chairs

Kitchen Before and After 

Once again, my absolute favorite room in the house. It was a huge project, but I'm glad we went for it. It's exactly what we wanted, there is something so gratifying about making your house a home with your own two hands. 

Living Room and Dining Room Remodel

When we started looking for houses we were naive and fearless. The first house we were pretty set on we had big ideas to rip out the deck, learn how to tile the bathrooms etc. Oh I'm so glad we didn't buy that house. We picked the house full of fun colors. It the South, everyone loves bold color, and every room in our house is(was) a different color. The previous owners left us gallons and gallons of paint. I hated the colors in the downstairs so much I told Scott that we were going to repaint before anyone helped us move in. I didn't want anyone to think that the colors in our house was a conscious decision on my part. Mature I know.

The kitchen was bright orange, the dining room was blood red, and the living room was sage green with brown accent panels. A different brown than what is on the stairs. Works for some people, just not for me. After several test colors we decided on Natural Grey by Behr. 

We had a pretty good laugh when we both discovered we had never painted a room without our parents before. Just learning how to be adults :). 

Living Room Before and After. 

We even went to a real store to buy furniture. It was an amazing day. 

It finally feels like ours! I'm loving learning all these new schools and getting to work with Scott. Next up for these two rooms are drapes, the mantle, and a centerpiece for the dining room table. 

Ps. If you follow us on instagram the hashtags we're using for our home projects are #dalysmakeahome and #dalydiy