Style Me Simple: Makeover Monday: Kitchen Cabinets

Today you are going to see pictures. Lots of pictures. Please be warned.

Since we moved in, I had decided that our oak colored cabinets needed to be a different color. I went back and forth between white and espresso. When we got Astro in October, I knew white was no longer an option - espresso it was. But I was nervous as crap to do the cabinets. What if I messed up? I don't have 15k to get new cabinets! So I put it off... and off... until February. At that point it was a now or never type of thing since we were getting our flooring done in March.

So, I did it. I followed Monica's tutorial for the most part (except I ran out of socks) and it worked out pretty well. Though it did take a solid three weeks of working on it. Total hours into the sanding, staining and sealing was about 40.

Here is what our kitchen looked like before I started the process (all photos are prior to us purchasing the house):

The cabinets look fine here, but then again everything is beige, once we switched to grey, it wasn't quite as cohesive.

Here is what the kitchen looked like throughout the process. There were times I got SUPER nervous:

See the progression? After the first coat I thought, "*Bleep*, what am I doing?!" But with each coat, things got better. I ended up doing 4 coats of stain and this is what it looked like when I finally put the doors back on:

Not so terrible, right? Here is a shot of the before and after next to each other:

Quite the difference!

Then my cabinets stayed just like you see above until last week when I finally worked up the nerve to put hardware on. Once I started doing it, it wasn't so scary, but man - putting holes in things freaks me out! There's one drawer that's slightly crooked, but I'm blaming it on the drawer itself.

I still need to put two more handles on the fake drawers, I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do it since I can't get behind them to drill. Wood glue?