Oldie but Goodie!

This is an oldie but goodie! I love my kitchen and the changes that we made! At the end of this long post I have current updated pictures of my kitchen today. Lucky for you, I cleaned before taking them :)

           

                                                                                                                                   

                                    .....................................................................

                                                                 May 2012

Here is the long awaited kitchen cabinet makeover!

I am so excited to share because I love, love, love, how they turned out!

These are pictures of our kitchen before we even moved in and painted. I fell in love with the house because of the kitchen. I love my huge island, the room to move around, and the openness into to the living room. I just wasn't a fan of all the dark colors. The floors were the same color of the cabinets, there was no contrast. So before we even moved in my plan was to paint these cabinets.

  We first started by labeling all the doors and drawers with numbers then removed them. Then we taped all around the inside (the kit doesn't give enough paint for the inside, I wouldn't want to do that anyways, too much work!) and outside of the cabinets. We covered the floors and counters with plastic.

I had a big package of Red cups from Costco which came in handy for the whole project. We put the hardware in cups and labeled which door they belonged to. I didn't want any screws, hinges, and knobs to be lost. This was a great way to keep track of them all. 

We bought Rust-Oleum Cabinet Transformations. The kit is supposed to be a quick easy project. No sanding or stripping, just deglossing. The deglossing took forever! I read all over the Internet that if you don't degloss very well then the paint won't stick and can chip. So we deglossed till our arms fell off. After delossing all the drawers and doors We were still a little worried about just using the deglosser so we created an extra step for ourselves and decided to use a high grit sandpaper and sand everything. (The lower the grit the rougher the sandpaper is. The higher the grit, the smoother the sandpaper.) I am sure it would have been fine without sanding, it was just about a peace of mind for me!

The red cups came in handy when it was time for painting and drying. On the instructional video they suggested using a 2x4 with screws that are screwed in just enough so it can hold the doors. On one blog I read, she said that the screws just left marks, plus, that seams like a lot of screws and 2x4's. The cups were much easier and left no damage.

Once all the dust was cleaned off, the real fun began! Painting! It was fun for about 5 doors until we realized that this was going to takeforever. The doors are supposed to take 2 coats of paint and one coat of the finish. The kit also comes with a glaze to give it a more wood look, but I like the Linen color by itself so we skipped the glazing step.

 I found this cabinet door at DI for Kambree to paint. I knew there was no way that she wasn't going to help. She loved helping and she did a pretty good job!

There are 2 sizes to the Rust-Oleum kit that we bought. We measured the kitchen and figured that we only needed to by the small kit. We even ended up with extra paint. The problem was from going from extreme dark to extreme light the 2 coats didn't cover all the way. It needed 3 coats of paint. UGH! We had enough extra to paint the cupboards, but not enough for the drawers and doors. So we had to go buy another kit. So, if you are going to paint your kitchen cabinets from dark to light and your not going to use the glaze, then you should probably make sure that you are going to have enough paint for 3 coats.

This whole thing was a lot of work but totally worth it. With Brian working and 2 sick kids, it took us about 9 days from start to finish. A lot of the blogs or tutorials I read say that this is a quick weekendproject. We did give ourselves extra steps as far as sanding and the extra coat of paint. I still don't think that if we skipped those extra steps we could have finished in a weekend.

Anyways, it is done! I am so excited! I love how they look! Totally worth all the hard work!

What do you think?

{before}

{after}