Kitchen Remodel - Part IX

Alright, here's where it gets downright exciting. Well, for us anyways. On MLK Day, I had the day off work. So, naturally, I spent the day doing home improvement. It was time to finally tackle the pesky kitchen cabinet doors with a paintbrush!

Before the painting commenced, though, Tom had a job I had designated him to do. Since our cabinets are seriously fossils, if not antiques (roughly 40-50 years old we are guessing..), they were a little worn down and beaten up. For the most part, the new hinges we were going to install would fix everything. But the drawers were a different story. Of the 4 drawers we have in our kitchen, 3 of them were broken. So Tom grabbed a flashlight and went Sherlock Holmes on them.

Anyways, after tightening a few screws, hammering in a few new ones, hammering the tracks and wheels for good measure, and a little WD-40, they were as good as... well, let's just say they worked. Since we had thought they were a lost cause to begin with, yes - we DID do the happy dance when we pulled on them and they came sliding out!

Isn't that hardware just purdy?!
After those were all fixed, it was time to let the painting begin!

First I created a work area, ensuring that I had appropriate lighting and enough space to move around in.

After spreading around trash bags, newspaper, and a canvas dropcloth to ensure floors didn't get paint on them, I proceeded to remove all the old hardware from the doors (before taking the doors down from the cabinets, I had inspected them to see if I needed to label where they were located for rehanging later. Luckily, every single door is a different size - and each had holes to show which side of the cabinet they went on.)

Luckily for us, there was no finish left on the doors - it had worn off over the past 50 years. So I skipped the sanding and proceeded to the next step: cleaning. I used a TSP substitute solution to get off any more grit and grime that was left on the doors (there had been quite a bit when we bought the house! Ew.).

Next came the hard work and the time intensive part. It took me 4 hours to put on one coat of paint on all the doors. So, I painted... one coat of primer... two coats of paint = 12 hours. Of course there were a few doors that needed a 4th coat - go figure. My advice: if you are painting old wood, go with two coats of primer for less bleed-through. Ah, live and learn.

So after 4 days of painting (starting after work until 10pm every night), these babies were dry and ready to be rehung!

Of course, we ran into an obstacle: the doors were completely stuck to the newspaper/dropcloth, and when we tried to pry them off, the paint came off. Oops.

So, we took a razor and scored along the sides of the cabinet, where we wanted the door to come off of the newspaper/dropcloth. This worked really well, and we ended up with mostly really clean lines of paint on the sides of the doors (and no drips from painting with this method).

Of course, we were left with a bit of newspaper on the backs of the doors...

... but nobody's gonna see the inside of the doors... right?

So, since hardware has changed in the past 40-or-so years, we bought the closest hinges we could find that were similar to our old ones. However, Tom still had to drill some new holes...

which he did... very, very carefully.

Then we just screwed in the new knobs and drawer pulls, and ta-da! Our new kitchen cabinets.

But before I do the big reveal, let's jump back in time (in March) of what our kitchen looked like the day we bought it:

Kitchen Before:

And our Kitchen Now:

It's really quite amazing. Painting the cabinets worked wonders and changed the whole feeling and personality of our kitchen! We love it, and are still in awe at how different our kitchen is now. It's like we have a whole new one.