Here's a mockup of the kitchen with a few of the changes that I'm talking about.

Will you be keeping the fridge? If you're replacing, a counter depth model may allow for cabinet access. A regular old top/bottom (or freezer on bottom) hinged on the right could help...anyway the side of the fridge might not be worse than the side of the range if you do move it.

I would not do any cabinet beautification at this point. I'd live with them and decide how terrible they are (or aren't). You'll probably want them all gone, especially when you're looking at things like pantries and hoods and upper cabinets.

If you're on a budget and don't mind DIY, take a look at IKEA for a white shakery cabinet. I just don't think you want to put in all that effort if a deep remodel ends up necessary.

But yeah--that ceiling! I hope that comes out easy! It's gotta go! =P

Your sink/DW/stove layout is very similar to mine, but my fridge is left of the stove, with 36" cabinet between them. The kitchen used to be a U-shape, with the stove where your fridge is located, and the fridge where your stove is now. We built an addition, with the new doorway to the right of the sink--not ideal, but we didn't want to move plumbing, and it works. Our bungalow/farm cottage was built in the late 1920's, and I've tried to get back to the vintage vibe. You can click on my username for links, if you want some ideas.

I like the cabinets and pulls in your mock-up--also kinda like the current butter yellow. Definitely install a hood--that's the main reason I switched my stove and fridge, to put in a vented hood on an exterior wall.

my honest opinion, this coming from a 1st time homeowner in a 1942 cottage: i would suggest you do nothing at this time other than paint. move in, learn how you will live there and what your needs are. from what i am seeing in the pictures, if it were me, i would wait and budget for a full remodel as opposed to a refresh. there appears to be layout and basic functional issues. by the time you spend money to fix those things you will have spent a decent amount of money and a lot of sweat that could be better applied toward a new kitchen. i think you are better off waiting until you can replace the cabinets, upgrade electrical, put in proper ventilation, get rid of the drop ceiling. this will likely be a full gut job given the age of the home. i recognize as a first time buyer you may have to wait years to do it, depending on your budget, but personally think that would be money well spent and a much better investment in your first home.

i am also a first time homeowner and lived with the original 1942 kitchen (one wall of kitchen pictured below) for 8 years before i had the budget to remodel. note the complete lack of counter space (rolled in a cart) and no ventilation. all money went instead into new kitchen fund. i cut my expenses to the bone to save for the remodel - no house cleaner, no yard help, limited eating out etc. this remodel was a gut job to the studs. see second picture for the after. knob and tube removed, electrical now up to current standards, abundant lighting, excellent ventilation (i can cook a steak and the house does not fill with smoke!), increased cabinet space, extended the hardwood floors from dining room, saved for stainless appliance. it is worth the wait. you can do it!

Tpirson, congrats! How exciting! I second babushkacat's comments. When we bought our home, our realtor who is also our friend suggested we do nothing until we live in the house for at least one year. Of course we decorated but I do think that was very good advice. It gave us time to get settled, decide on what we wanted and save up $ for our future projects. Good luck to you!

Thanks for the advice everyone!

To answer a few questions throughout, we'll be keeping all the appliances, including washer & dryer, as we negotiated them into the price. I believe that all are 5-7 years old and were purchased by the current owner. The fridge in our apartment is the land where leftovers go to die and is much smaller than this. If the fridge still seems too much for just my wife and I next year, I'm proposing we sell it for whatever we can and get a smaller side-by-side.

The current layout of the kitchen is close to the original layout. We looked at a nearly identical house down the street that would have required much more immediate work (peeling dark wooden laminate cabinets with gaudy handles right in the middle of the door, bright orange laminate countertops, goldenrod stove, and seafoam green fridge) but the original footprint remained.
The only major layout difference is that in the house we've purchased, about half the width of the wall separating the kitchen and dining room has been blown out to open up both spaces, replacing a narrow doorway.

We'll be starting the painting on the second floor,(one room was a nursery (to become taupe), one a little boy's room(undecided on color), one a spare bedroom (current wall color is great, to become office). I'll also be doing everything I can to ignore the rolled on almost-popcorn ceilings upstairs, that look more like stalactites or teeth than popcorn, and seem to be as hard as rock.

Then we'll be tearing down the drop ceiling in the kitchen, getting the ducts and carpets cleaned, paint the dining room and back bedroom, finally turning attention to the kitchen.

We'll also be trying to get most of the painting done before we actually move everything over from the apartment. Maybe by the time we get to the kitchen, I'll just be tapped out.

Well, I second all the good advice. It sounds like you're handy and energetic, though, so if you'd have fun making some changes now that you wouldn't mind tearing out later on...great! I just wish I were like that too.

So, Craftsman look. NOT painted, not Shaker. How about stripping those cabinets to bare wood and finishing that? The Craftsman era was BIG-BIG-BIG on natural wood. If you wanted, you could finish with wood strips as you're imagining, although I feel the return for all that work would be relatively minor. Craftsman would be a stronger, more masculine look than Shaker, though. Of course, if you prefer a painted look, paint was around all through the Craftsman era, and you could use one of the many nature-inspired colors of that era. Greeny blues/bluey greens were among them. Quicker fix, too.

In any case, after fixing the ceiling, how about rehanging the upper cabinets close to the ceiling, with a simple strong board finish at the top, and then constructing open shelves below them? With as thick a wood as will go with the rest.

Backsplash? Ultimately Craftsman era tile, of course. The choices and colors are fantastic. But even economizing on detail tiles, it would be fairly expensive, not for temporary installation. In the meantime, you could take some of those board strips you're thinking of for the cabinets and panel the wall with them. Subway tiles were not a Craftsman look; they were mass produced, not a back-to-handcraftsmanship reaction to mass production, not showing off natural materials, not strongly masculine, white not a nature color, etc. Hand-crafted tiles in a long rectangle called "subway" are now available, but also too expensive for temporary.

Do you actually want a Craftsman look, though, with its strong exposed structural members, handcrafted look, earthy colors, strong no-nonsense lines, etc? Or?

My own favorite look is early 1900s cottage/modest home and the charming painted kitchens that came out of that. If you want to hark back to that era, you have an excellent start with your plain panel cabinet doors, which are very period authentic. You could have fun on your backplash with some embossed white wallpaper, available at the big box stores inexpensively, painting it like the anaglypta popular in the Victorian era. The texture would look very nice juxtaposed against the simplicity of the cabinets.

The shelves, in normal-thickness boards, would look charming, too, although they were more prone to framing the sink window with open shelves than running them below. I'd do the below myself anyway.

Whatever, enjoy!

Forgot to mention, your kitchen is fantastic, BC. Definitely worth all you put into it. I love it!

Thanks Rosie,
I don't think stripping the cabinets is an option. I don't believe that it may be some laminated MDF or fiberboard material. Unfortunately, ALL of the woodwork in the house has been painted and while I am handy and energetic. I don't think I have the drive to strip everything down to the original wood. I stripped a many times painted chair years ago and that took the fight out of me before I got to the sanding and crack filling. While walking through, I mentioned stripping the woodwork just to watch everyone who knew the story cringe. ;)

Before I undertook something like that I would really need to find a test spot to see what the actual wood was underneath. A lot of the catalog bungalows built in my area didn't use high quality woods for the trim and were always intended to be painted.

I need to stop saying Craftsman in describing the style of the what we're going for. As you said, it's the clean lines I'm after. Wide trim, earthy colors, but then again, I'm not a stickler for 100% period accuracy. I enjoy it, but my wife is not "big-big-big" on natural wood.

If I had the time, funds and will, I would be stripping the paint off the wood, tearing out the chair rail and bead board in the dining room and replacing it with woodwork matching the height of the built in bookcases between the living room and dining room and top it off with big fat square dentil molding below a study plate rail. Fortunately, I'm surrounded by people that temper my exuberance for diving headlong into major projects and learning as I go.

A 1925 kitchen would almost certainly have been painted. I wouldn't go over the top Craftsman, since that style would've already been on its way out when the home was built.

Hi tpirson,

About 12 years ago, I shaker-fied my slab doors by doing the same thing you're proposing. It just makes the cabs look way too thick and just looks like bad DIY. I think you'll regret doing this, as I did.

I think you need to do the kitchen right the first time, so I would stick to paint and possibly new hardware for now, as others have suggested. Your kitchen looks like it needs drawers and possible a bit of a layout shift, so i would wait until I had enough money to make those changes.

Pawa,
Do you have any pictures of your cabinets?

Here they are, in all their glory :-)

I never filled the gaps between the glued-on wood and the cabinet faces, as you're planning to do. Even if I had, I still don't think it would have looked that great because they're just too thick.

pawa, your doors don't look bad--are the slab drawers the same depth as the cabinet door trim? Having them all the same depth might make a difference.

tpirson, I built a narrow door for a tray cabinet, using the same method you propose. I added 1/4" trim to 1/2" (7/16ths) plywood, to match the vintage cabs I used in the same run. If you decide to go ahead with your project, I have a couple of suggestions: Use 1/4", standard width poplar trim--it will be a little more expensive than ripping your own plywood strips, but a much smoother finish, and SO MUCH EASIER. All you'll need is a chop saw to make easy, square cuts. Which leads to my next suggestion--do not do mitered corners for the trim. IMO the cope and stick/mortise and tenon joint (appearance) would be easier and more authentic. Also, if the back side of the doors have less, or no, bevel, you might consider flipping them--any hinge holes will be covered by the new trim. Oh, I know I sound really pushy, but I did a very low budget, very DIY, facelift on my kitchen last year, and your goals seem similar to mine.

Good luck! I'm looking forward to following your progress.

Pawa,

I had the same question as mama goose. By themselves, the cabinets don't seem too thick, until compared with the thinner drawers above.

Mama goose,

I hadn't thought of the poplar trim, plywood and MDF were the first to come to mind, but I didn't want the hassle of trying to sand MDF smooth. As for the corners, I was thinking of doing the same square mortise-and-tenon look as you mentioned.

As for hardware, I'll be trying to match the original house hardware (the knob, probably not the drawer pulls) that you can see on the upstairs linen closet.

Oh yeah, I should also mention that the trim dimensions for the kitchen cabinets would be to try and match the upper linen closet door without the vertical piece in the center since none of the kitchen cabinets are as large or wide as that one.

Oh wow! That's a really lovely upstairs!

So, are your doors perfectly square at the edges (i.e.: not rounded, like mine?) If so, you might be able to pull off the shaker door style by filling the cracks with wood filler.

Yes, I suppose they appear thicker because of the drawer above.

Regarding the upper cabinets next to the fridge that are hard to get into. If you don't want to move or replace the large fridge immediately, you might consider removing the doors from those upper cabinets. You could paint the inside a fun color and use those cabinets for dishware. When we first bought our house (10 years ago), we took the doors off a corner cabinet that I could not reach into around the doors, painted the inside box yellow to match our walls, but left the shelf white. Our cabinets were white mdf. It made the cabinet functional and added visual interest for the 10 years before we actually remodeled.

I agree with Babushka Cat. We live in a house that was built in 1920, and our kitchen was original when we moved in. Unfortunately it wasn't well maintained and we had to remove it. Your cabinets are exactly the style we had. If my kitchen looked like yours, I would do nothing more than all glass cabinet pulls and get a smaller fridge. It's beautiful. Plain flat front painted cabinets are what would be in a 1920s home.

I did a cherry kitchen in my very small 1923 bungalow and really loved it for the remaining years that I owned that house. Make sure to look at Jane Powell's book, Bungalow Kitchens, for many more ideas. The first photo is my former kitchen. The second was my inspiration photo, pulled from somewhere on the web (I really don't know where I got it, so my apologies if it belongs to someone here).

Ya know, I.A.A.T.Food is onto something. The base cabs look appropriate for the period. The tops don't because they're stubby. If you lose the doors on all the uppers (if you can stand being that exposed), it would be awfully cute. Even replacing the upper doors with glass doors (or inserting glass if you're crafty) would be an inexpensive improvement in the looks of the room.

Your upstairs is lovely--it looks so light and fresh! I love the trim, and built-ins. I wouldn't worry about an exact match to the trim on the linen closet door (if there is no stock width to match), unless it's one of those little details that will disappoint you every time you see it.

You really are lucky that someone didn't stick soffits up above the cabinets! If you keep the doors as is, is there a possibility you can remove the uppers and mount them higher on the wall? I've seen that done, with an open shelf added underneath. That would cost only your time, and lumber for the shelf and trim.

Here is a link that might be useful: Inspiration--corbels and cup shelves

Your cabs are not original to the '20s. However, the lipped partial overlay drawer fronts are the same style as the originals. Save yourself some trouble, and put your shaker trim on the doors, but leave the drawers alone except for the hardware.