Back to the rowhouse kitchen! I’m bashing a modern kitchen kit from SDK Miniatures. The instructions for the upper cabinets were a little confusing (or maybe I didn’t read them carefully). The two sets of shelves and the wine rack need to be glued to the front piece before the front/back/sides are glued together, otherwise they would be hard to get in.

Also it would have been better if I’d painted the inside back piece beige since it’s hard to get a paintbrush in and paint the backs of the shelves, but I didn’t realize that until it was too late…

I didn’t have enough flooring strips left for the kitchen, but wasn’t crazy about using tiles. I found a piece of flooring sheet in my stash that would fit the kitchen and was pretty similar in size and color to the flooring I used everywhere else. Ideally I would have had the floorboards running the other way (the length of the room) but decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth… I had this sheet already, it was free!

I stained the flooring sheet with Minwax English Oak because the Golden Oak that I used for the rest of the house looked too dark on this wood. The single floorboard off to the left is one of the ones from the rest of the house.

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When I first started working on the rowhouse last fall, I bought a modern kitchen kit from SDK Miniatures with the plan of bashing it a bit. Here were my early ideas. I started working on the kit today.

The cabinets are made from wooden boxes with trim pieces laid on the fronts to give the illusion of cabinet doors and drawers. This means the doors and drawers don’t open, which is fine with me!

Here’s the basic layout. The L-shaped counter is exactly how it comes in the kit — no bashing there. But the tall piece on the left originally had three segments – an oven/microwave unit, a pantry, and a tall and skinny fridge that I didn’t like. I removed the fridge portion.

Instead, I’ll use a magnet fridge (but i might try painting it “stainless”…)

Since the L-shaped cabinet is going together as designed, I breezed through its assembly pretty quickly today. I painted them with a Behr color named “Tuscan Beige” which is essentially off-white.

The kit is designed to have decorative paper placed behind the trim piece. I’d been planning to use this wallpaper from Itsy Bitsy Mini. It looked neat in theory.

But I didn’t like it in practice. I think the decorative paper is a neat idea and it would work well in a shabby chic house, but maybe a little too kitchy for my Victorian.

Instead, I painted the cabinet base with the same Olivewood paint I’m using for exterior trim.

I like the idea of this but am not totally sold on it yet. I feel like the white part should be wider, or the doors should have some sort of detail, or something. Might still play around with it.

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