We love our house but it wasn’t a new build so we didn’t get to customize all the details. One of the biggest thing about the kitchen is dark cabinets. Our dream kitchen would be white cabinets but ours are really nice so can’t quite pull the trigger on painting them white. I decided this coffee bar corner would be the perfect test run. Another factor is convincing the husband 😂 he mighttt be sold after finishing this project up 🙌🏻

We were originally going to paint the shelves but we didn’t know how they were secured to the wall. To our surprise they were floating shelves that just slid on the supports and weren’t screwed into the supports! They caulked around the edges but that was it. You can see what they looked like here:

We wanted to move the shelf up slightly so that our Nespresso machine could open even if it was pushed to the back of the wall because the current shelf height didn’t allow for it. Once we got the shelf off we really couldn’t tell if they were real wood based on the espresso coating that was on it so we tested sanding it and to our surprise it had a really pretty wood grain underneath the surface. It came at a price though…it took a full day and a half just to strip these bad boys. My entire body was sore after all the sanding that occurred 🤣 We used an electric sander for the first shelf and for the second we tried citristrip and the consensus was that each was equally painful and annoying lol but it saved a lot of money by being able to reuse the shelves and the time in building new. Here are some pictures of the process:

After the shelves were stripped we stained them a natural wood color and they really turned out better than we imagined.

The next part of the project was getting the shiplap up. See this Shiplap post for details on that process!

The last step which took a good amount of time was getting the cabinets painted white. Again a tutorial here on painting kitchen cabinets!

White just brightens up spaces so much! Excited to see how they hold up before we make the decision to paint the whole kitchen 🤞🏻 Lastly we added some new Matte Black Knobs we got for $3 at Lowe’s.

Here’s the before and then the final product:

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