I'm Dreaming of a White Kitchen

I was so tired of staring at half primed cabinets. About two weeks ago, I had 3 days off in a row in the middle of the week. A perfect time to finally tackle this project. And it took all 3 days.

I'm not going to do a very detailed tutorial since this is the second kitchen I've painted (the old one can be found here).

This go-round I did not remove the doors for two reasons. One: I didn't have the floor space to lay the doors out for a week like last time. Two: I didn't feel like it.

Here is the basic step-by-step of what I did.

1. Lightly sand cabinets
2. Whip dust off
3. Tape off hinges and walls
4. Prime with oil-based primer
5. Paint two coats of no-VOC semi-gloss latex paint (I used Sherwin Williams Antique White).

I also used a skinny roller on all the cabinets and doors. This really speeds things up and give it a smoother finish. First, use a brush to get all the tight spots and grooves. Then, while still wet, roll over the large areas and on top of the brush strokes (to get rid of them).

I didn't paint the insides of the cabinets. Just the outside and backs of the doors. The insides are a much lighter color wood and new and clean, so there was really no need to paint them.

It's amazing how much the kitchen has changed in the last 6 months.

















I am still working on getting the boards for the open shelving ready to be installed. They will go to the left and right of the window (in that blank space).




We save a lot on the hardware by buying them on ebay. The basic knobs at Lowes are around $4 each. I got mine for $1 each, saving a ton of money!




The photo above shows the cabinet that Matt cut down to size and remade the doors. The doors had open grids that were intended to have glass added. The cabinet was also twice as tall. Like the glass front cabinet shown on the right here:



We didn't have a place for it (since we're planning on adding open-shelving), and we needed an over the microwave cabinet. Since the microwave vent is inside, we couldn't have glass front doors, so my idea was to fill them in with scrap bead board. I think it turned out great! It doesn't show on the photo, but you can see the seam halfway up the door frame where we cut and glued them together. But it's really not obvious enough to bother me.




This is our bonus cabinet. Obviously, it wouldn't work to turn it around because the door wouldn't open. This was much easier and faster than Matt trying to build a corner cabinet from scratch. And it gives us an extra 8 or 10 inches of peninsula (room for all 4 bar stools).

The long term plan for the back of the peninsula (shown above), is to remove the cabinet doors and install reclamined wood or pallet boards on the entire thing. Like this:




I'd like to make cabinet doors out of the same wood so that the cabinet is hidden but functional. Right now it's holding tools and DIY supplies for all the projects we are working on, so that we don't have to keep going all the way downstairs to the garage for a simple screw driver or paint brush.