Painting Kitchen Cupboards

RA board approves superintendent contract, summer projects

Thursday night, Ruthven-Ayrshire school board members hired staff, authorized an action plan, approved the superintendent's evaluation and 2011-12 contract, and authorized several summer facility projects.

Staff members Connie Larson, Amy Sikora and Mary Smith reworked an action plan discussed Tuesday night by Ruthven-Ayrshire board members and teachers. The approved plan targets the areas of attitude and morale; leadership team, professional development and Lighthouse project; administrative, board and staff input and ownership; communication, respect and conflict resolution. Instead of dividing each of the sections into specific recommendations for the board, teachers and superintendent, the revised 2011-12 action plan is now designed with accountability for all. It was submitted to Dr. Norene Bunt, Ruthven-Ayrshire's superintendent, and board member Matt Graves before Thursday's meeting.

"I'm fully in support of it," Bunt said.

Board member Barry Fischer asked that the unanimously-approved plan, and its implementation, be revisited in September or October.

In personnel matters, board members approved the resignation of superintendent secretary Allison Birkey. The board also approved the issuance of contracts for Lisa Hoyle as a full-time superintendent secretary, Janine Hough as a halftime family and consumer science teacher, Donna Ball as a special education aide, Lisa Skaar as a high school science instructor, and Tim Nielsen as a TAG teacher.

Noting all teaching positions have been filled for the upcoming year, Bunt recognized Jon Josephson for recruiting several of the district's new hires.

"He helped us get some great staff," she said.

Ruthven-Ayrshire coaching positions still open include head football, head volleyball and a shared high school and middle school track position. The junior class and National Honor Society sponsorships also remain open.

In other action, board members approved several summer facility work projects. The projects, which totaled $120,525, were awarded to low bidders.

Painting Kitchen Cabinets and Changing Hardware & Drawer Slides ...

The next few days, we’ll be going over all of the steps we took to renovate our kitchen last year.  It was a big project involving about about three months’ worth of solid after dinner work.

To give some background on the motivation behind the project: when we moved in, the kitchen looked like this:

There was a set of cabinets over the sink counter that hung so low that you actually had to duck to be able to have a conversation with someone sitting at the bar ledge.  Don’t mind the mess…these photos are from move-in day.

There were a few things we wanted to do in the kitchen to update it and create a warmer feel.

Paint the cabinets a chocolate brown color to match the flecks in the granite counter. Change the hardware on the cabinets Change the drawer sliders to full-extension to allow us to access the entire drawer. Rip out the low hanging cabinets. Replace the lost cabinet space by building new floor and wall cabinets in the corner of the breakfast nook. Take out the fluorescent, high school cafeteria-style lights and replace with a track lighting fixture. Add recessed lighting over the bar area to increase lighting in the family room and kitchen. Add crown moulding to accent the painted cabinets. Add shelves to store coffee supplies off of the counter.

Today we’ll talk about #’s 1, 2, and 3.  Painting the cabinets and changing the hardware and drawer slides.  We picked a Behr paint color this time.  Color: Bear Rug, a chocolate brown.

As we’ve said before, sadly there isn’t much of a trick to painting.  It’s just one of those labor-intensive things you just have to do.  We started by removing all of the cabinet doors.  The next few steps were simple but time-consuming.

Painting Kitchen Cabinets + Bonus! Changing Hardware and Drawer Slides

Step Two : Label all the cabinets!  In about two minutes flat, you won’t remember which door goes where, and they are all very shockingly similar.  Trust us on this.  We used a pen and wrote codes like “Sink DL”, which meant floor cabinet to the left of the sink, in the hinge area that would never be seen and would also not be painted over.