Kitchen

It seemed like a really long process for us. Duncan and I started this project at the end of the summer (August?). It was our first large home improvement project so we experimented, took our time, and learned a lot. It may not have been the smartest move to choose our kitchen as the first big project, but we thought if a facelift could make us happy enough to skip a remodel for a long time, it would be worth it (and was).

Here is what we ended up doing:

1) Painted sample drawers to test the paint color and determine brush vs. roller

2) Removed all cabinets and hinges

3) Wet sanded base cabinets in the kitchen, dry sanded doors and drawers outside

4) Re-oriented cabinet door handles (from angle to straight up and down) with wood putty, sanding, drilling.

5) Painted base, doors, and drawers

6) Bought and put up new hinges and handles

7) Painted kitchen walls a lovely green

8) Painted kitchen trim a bright white

9) Planed down cabinet doors

10) Painted new inside edges of doors and touch-up damaged spots on cabinets

11) Turned dish cabinet into open cabinet (puttied hinge spots, painted, lined bottom with vinyl for the dishes)

12) Made cute little café curtains for the kitchen window

We chose an off white paint to slightly contrast with the ultra white counters (since we aren’t replacing the counters anytime soon).

My first step was to sample paint. I did two sample drawers to decide if we wanted to use the brush or foam roller (foam roller won). They actually looked almost identical, but the brush took two to three times as long as the roller for me to get it looking as perfect. We did use the brush on a lot of the base cabinets, so it was really convenient that they looked so much alike.

We were fortunate that Elizabeth got to have a slumber party with her Grandparents during the bulk of the sanding and painting of the lower cabinets (I did the lower cabinets one weekend and the upper cabinets a month later).

Many of the screws and hinges on the cabinets were in bad shape and I had a hard time removing them (I had to call in Duncan to get the ones I couldn’t). At that point we decided it would be really nice to have new hinges and hardware (we were originally going to spray paint other hardware we have in the garage a black satin and use that). So we went out and bought new hinges that matched our cabinet type (or seemingly did) and new handles (both in brushed silver).

After removing the doors and drawers, I wet sanded the base of the cabinets inside and dry sanded the doors and drawers outside. I used a paint and primer in one so I didn’t have to prime (I am a bit lazy, but I also had only a set time without a toddler and I needed to be able to get some of the bottom cabinet doors back on before she got home).

Right before Elizabeth got home we put the doors back on below the sink (They are childproofed because of the cleaning products). Sadly this is when we discovered that the hinges push our doors closer together than our previous ones did to the point where they overlap and don’t stay closed. It wasn’t too bad on this first one and we were able to re-drill the hinge holes and got it to close, but we found that some were much worse and we needed to plane the sides of all the cabinet doors (maybe the least fun thing ever).

Here is some of the newly overlapping cabinets (the ones below had been scraping the paint off to just barely close; the ones below that didn’t even close anymore):

Our next problem came from the month delay in putting the remaining bottom cabinets back on (or more precisely from the cabinets stacked against each other in the garage for a month). I learned that 24 hours is not long enough for painted things to dry before they are stacked, leaning against each other. L

A month later I finished painting the upper cabinets (and the kitchen trim and the walls!) while Duncan was out of town for a week (and during the evening when Elizabeth was in bed).

After this we had to plane the cabinets (slice down the cabinet doors so that they could close together). At first we bought a hand planer, but that was such a pain we stalled on the project and lived with the kitchen (like the above picture) for another month before breaking down and buying an electric planer.

Here is where Duncan really joined the project (he doesn’t paint). He thought I would hurt myself with the planer.

I DO NOT recommend using an electric planer with one hand while standing on a chair and holding the cabinet with the other hand. Even while my wonderful husband was doing this I was cringing and NOT recommending it. We DO NOT recommend anyone else try this.

We had some handling drilling mishaps (see puttied spot above) and some touchups from the planer. Finally coming together!

We had gotten so used to easy access to the dishes when the cabinet doors were off that we decided we wanted to keep it like that. So I puttied the hinge holes and painted the interior of that cabinet white. We decided to line the cabinets with vinyl for durability (and so we could put dishes on right away instead of waiting a month to cure).

To finish I made new café curtains for the kitchen window (the old roll blind was dirty and unattractive so I threw it out after taking it down to paint the trim). I have enough of the fabric left to make roman shades if I change my mind, but so far I’m loving thelittle curtains.