Well, back to reality! We have very dark cabinets, very dark, and the kitchen is in the corner of the room... Which is a living room, dining room, and kitchen space. That makes it look dark and small, which, it really isn't. Knowing that we can't gut the kitchen, and the cabinets are in good shape we opted for just painting them. Eventually we want to put new floors in, appliances, backsplash, and new lighting... But those other thing will have to wait.
The first thing we did is look up the best way to paint the cabinets. There are different way to do it... Some looked harder than others.. But what we ended up doing was the rust-o-leum cabinet transformations in linen:
We decided to not do the glaze.
It has a video u can watch to get you started (we watched it) and it looks very easy. The difficulty of the kit isn't "hard" it's just time consuming and it took us about a week to do. On the home improvement show we watched it took them two days... Of course they didn't have kids. We did have to do 4 coats to really cover the dark brown of the cabinets. Which is probably another reason it took us longer.
First thing we had to do is draw out a diagram of our kitchen, numbering every door and then sticking that number to the cabinet door with painters tape. This is important, if you don't you won't remember what door goes where. Next, we had to really clean each door, even though we just did that when we moved in.. We did it again, and I couldn't believe how dirty they were! We removed the hardware and because we decided to put different handles on we had to fill one of the holes. Then we scrubed them with the solution they provided and let them dry. There is a lot of drying periods. We set up a station in our garage to paint them and the kit suggests a couple different ways to set it up. My husband drilled screws in this large piece of old wood we had... Almost like a large table. Then we painted, let it dry, painted, let it dry, painted, let it dry, and so on... The kit suggests two coats, but we did 4. After the second one we could still see the dark wood grain... Third one, still could see it. So I was thankful that we bought two kits. Although one did three coats on everything. The last part was to put the protectant on and it gave everything a nice glossy finish.
Now the best part... Putting the new handles on (we got these at a local cabinet shop...which ended up being cheaper then the big box hardware store in town) and placing the cabinet doors back on! Yay! One thing we wanted to make sure of was that everything was good and dry before we did... If not the doors would stick and make marks... Which would ruin all the hard work we put into them. I'm so glad we put numbers on them or we would of taken FOREVER to put back up. It's amazing how it's difficult to remember which door goes where and which is the top or bottom. Lol... You should of seen us even though we had everything mark..lol... I think we still put a couple on upside down. We were so tired, but it looked great if you ask me :) ... My husband.. Isn't much of a DYI'er kept saying how "terrible" everything was until the very end when it was completely finished then he commented how much better looked. Ha! I thought... See! Here is the finish project :)
next we are painting the backsplash brick white and then putting those peel and stick metal tiles up behind the stove. Don't worry.. I'll write you about those too!
Thanks for reading my blog! I hope it made you smile and maybe inspired you a little :)
Till next time! Please subscribe!
-Jennifer
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