Painting my Drawers

If you've been following along for awhile you know I've painted inside a few cupboards.  As in almost every one on our main floor:

Kitchen cleaning cupboard
Office closets
Office cupboard
Kitchen dishes cupboard
Kitchen cupboard over the stove
Baking cupboard
Upper cabinets (holiday dishes)
Alcohol cabinet
Pantry Cupboard

It was just a matter of time before I tackled the rest of the kitchen.  Honestly, this was not a project I was looking forward to but I had put it down on my monthly to-do list and I wanted to cross it off.  And I needed a project for a Saturday.  I feel a lot of pressure (internally) to get things done on free Saturdays when we have them.  But also as much as I was dreading having the kitchen a little torn up I am really glad we are at the point in our house where the projects we have to tackle are things like painting inside cabinets, drawers, and doing extra organizing things.  It's pretty wonderful and I intend to enjoy that because it took us 10 years to get here!

Here is where we started:

So to painting them: emptied them out and covered the dining table.  Yay.  Not my favorite part.  Pulled out all the contact paper (some of which I had put in a few years ago), sprayed them all down with vinegar and wiped.  I did this on a beautiful spring day so did all the spraying and painting outside which was wonderful.  Luke was able to run around the yard and Matt was around working on his projects and it was nice to kinda be together and enjoying the beautiful day but still getting things done.

First was two coats of white paint all over.  Except the bottoms because that would have added to the painting/drying process.  And the backs.  I had started to paint the backs and then realized that 1) That's where I had written which drawer was which and 2) WHO is every going to see the back of the drawers?  Pretty sure I lived here 8 years or something before I pulled them all out all the way.  So it doesn't matter.

I had seen pins on Pinterest about painting accent colors inside kitchen cupboards which I obviously didn't do because I didn't want the cupboard color to be fighting with our colored dishes.  But I also some pins on painting the sides of drawers.  I thought that would be a nice way to add some color to our mostly grey kitchen so I had picked up a quart of green paint at Lowe's earlier.  I did a 3rd coat of white on the insides, let that dry while we went to Mass, and then quickly did two coats of the green on the outside sides.  I got Matt to help me with the first coat which really helped knock it out.

I let the drawers cure in the garage for almost two full days before lining them.  After painting them on Saturday I had looked around Amazon for some contact paper to line them.  Thanks to Amazon Prime it was delivered less than 48 hours later and just in time for me to line them.  I used this Casey Navy pattern which I am kinda obsessed with now.  I LOVE the contrast of the navy with the white drawers.  And this shade of green + the navy + white is one of my favorite color combos.  There is a good chance this liner will be showing up in more places around the house.

I didn't do much purging when putting the drawers back together, but I had recently cleaned them out anyways.  It is still such a huge difference!  Look how pretty!

One tiny problem...one of the drawers can't come out unless we move the stove completely out.  Which we didn't do.  That seems like a lot of work just to paint a drawer?  So now I have to decide if we move the stove, pull out the drawer, move the stove back, paint the drawer, pull out the stove, replace drawer, move stove again.  OR just paint what I can without moving the stove.  I haven't decided (and honestly will probably come down to if Matt is willing to move the stove 4 times) so for now it's stayed ugly.  But good for a quick reminder how much of a difference this makes!  A little before and after (unpainted drawer on the left, the before is 2+ years old so the drawers had been more organized since):

I never look forward to these projects but the hands on time it took (maybe 4 hours over 2 days) and the tiny bit of time the kitchen was torn up (a little over 48 hours) is definitely worth the end result.  I have never regretted any of these crazy painting projects I've taken on.  Now I just have to psych myself up to paint all the lower cabinets...it needs to happen.