Used Kitchen Cabinets?

Paint’s done!  Kitchen cabinets are installed!  Wood is going up!  Progress.

Living Room/Garage Wall

Swing Right to West Side of Living Room

Don has been working diligently on the house.  We finished the painting and are very happy with the colors.  The downstairs is a color called ‘sagey’, but it’s close to a very light minty green, almost white.  It goes very well with our colored cement floors.  Remember when I splashed that floor sealer in my face?  Seems like eons ago.  Now, when you sweep across the cement floor, it is so nice and smooth. We may apply a wax as suggested, but for now I like it muted and not so shiny.

The downstairs bath is painted a ‘natural tan’.  I was looking for a shade of brown that would go with the new towels I bought when we ‘staged’ our house in Silver Springs.  They are new and would be great for the bath that is used the most and probably by guests.  Unfortunately, the towels are packed away somewhere (probably in Nevada) and I am most certain the color isn’t anywhere close to the new paint.  So much for planning.  I like it anyway.

Upstairs Color, Daniel's closet

Starting on the ceiling over the stairs (a good breaking point), we painting the upstairs ceiling and north and south walls, along with the insides of the closets a creamy beige color.  I forget what it is called.  It looks nice and should go very well with the pine east and west walls we have planned.  Since the only windows upstairs are on the north and south walls, we wanted to stay as light as possible (without going white).  

Subtle Purple with leaves :)

I kind of got carried away in my bathroom.  It was the last room to get paint and I painted that one myself.  The color is called Destiny, but in layman’s terms, it means purple.  Now it’s not Barney or Purple People Eater Purple, but a light shade of mauve.  It’s a dramatic statement in a room so small.  I also got a wild hair and took these leaf stencils (they look like leaf skeletons) and painted them into the walls.  The effect is very subtle (there are only 25) and I like it. 

I am seriously considering going a step further and taking the light green paint from downstairs and skipping it over the purple, which is possible with the type of texture we have.  (We could see the effects of ‘skipping’ when you first applied the paint over the primer.)  The problem is that I don’t have a lot of paint left to fix it if it looks bad.  And I keep thinking it might have a muddy effect.  And paint is expensive.  So I may just try a spot behind where the bathtub will be framed in just to see what it looks like.  I am open to suggestions.

Last week, Don began to hang the kitchen cabinets and in a few days, he was done!  I love these cabinets that we bought online via Craigslist.  If I haven’t mentioned before, I had been watching Craigslist for things we could use in the new house and I found some ‘used’ kitchen cabinets.  

Kitchen (without doors or tops or anything else)

One has to wonder the condition of ‘used’ cabinets.  When I first showed the ad to Don, along with pictures, he told me “it has to be a scam”.  (Don isn’t as optimistic as I am.)  

So I emailed the guy who posted the ad and got no response.  A couple days later I emailed him again.  About a week later I received a response to my email. It seems my messages were going into his SPAM folder.  He still had the cabinets for sale and did I want to come and see them?  The home was located in a newly developed, high-end area on the west side of Reno.  So Don and I drove in and met with Lyle and his wife.  I don’t remember her name, but she is such a nice person who is originally from Spain.  I remember their daughter and son-in-law both teach at UNR.

Hallway in Progress

They were in the process of remodeling their two-year old home into what I can only call a Spanish Villa.  It wasn’t my taste at all, but it was certainly beautiful.  One look at the ‘old’ cabinets (which appeared brand new) and Don and I were sold.  We purchased an entire (large) kitchen full of cabinets, an island, a laundry room set of uppers and lowers complete with sink, hall cabinets and a brand new, never used stainless steel dishwasher for $2250.  This even included the granite countertops if they could be saved during dismantle, which they could not.

Production Center

My new kitchen has beautiful knotty alder cabinets with melamine interiors and nice upgraded door hinges and drawer slides.  There was quite a bit of work uninstalling them and reinstalling them and some finishing work to do where there were walls in Lyle’s house and not in ours, but basically we saved a fortune.  Bought a barely used JennAir double oven on Craigslist too!  By the way, as you can see in the picture, we haven’t put the doors back on yet.  

 It’s getting chilly up here in NEWA and we’re still living in the travel trailer (eating meals at mom’s).  We hope to be in the house by Thanksgiving, but currently have only two electrical plugs and no plumbing.  The nice part is that we are moving right along.