One of the biggest selling points when my husband and I purchased our house was our kitchen. It was a pretty decent size kitchen with a good amount of cabinet space for an older and smaller house. The ceilings were tall and I just saw so much potential.
This is what our kitchen looked like before. It is a nice size, but the cabinets look dull and scratched up.
So one day I decided that I was going to fix my kitchen up!
I always loved the antique cabinet look and while watching a TV show that had antique cabinets in the background, I was inspired to TRY to do that to my cabinets.
It shouldn't hurt, I thought. The cabinets already had the dings and scratches in them. The coloring of the cabinets wasn't bad, so why not go with the "beat up" look and apply some stain and call it a day, right? Not so much.
My problem was I was working with laminate cabinets. No matter how much I sanded, no stain was taking on that composite wood. Only real wood takes on stain.
In the picture above, the antique look didn't look too bad from far away, but up close, it looked awful. And knowing me, this wasn't going to work.
My thinking behind antiquing was that I could do it without taking down the doors and the backside of the doors were fine. They really didn't need to be stained. Plus stain soaks into the wood and you really don't need to worry about chipping.
Well after 5 tries of sanding and staining, I gave up. So on to the other option...painting.
I had to go with a oil based paint, since I was applying stain previously (stain is oil based). The only oil based paint my local Lowes had was Valspar. Which is fine, but it made me realize that oil base paint was probably not going to be around much longer and it makes me kind of sad.
I had seen this picture of these beautiful chocolate brown cabinets and I was suddenly re-inspired. So I found a chocolate brown swatch and had Lowes mix me up some of that chocolate goodness.
Then the magic happened!
All I did was sand and paint. They needed about 3 coats of paint. I also applied a polyurethane afterwards to give them a protective coat.
Above is the paint I used with the formula to get close to the swatch I wanted.
And the Poly I used to give the protective coating.
I used an angled brush for oil based paints. To clean my brush, I used Mineral Spirits and Dawn dish soap.
I left my brush soaking over night in a metal bowl. Then the next day I rinsed and cleaned with the Dawn dish soap. Make sure you rinse very well! After cleaning hang up to dry.
And yes, I had to take all of the doors off the cabinets. Thanks to my wonderful husband, he did that part for me.
This project ended up taking longer and was more tedious then expected, but the results were pretty satisfying! The finish that oil based paint gives is very nice! I've had many people think I stained all my cabinets.
I also upgraded my counter top. I decided on a laminate with a beveled edge that has a shiny finish and little divots in it to make it look more like granite.
Countertop cost $725
Cabinets cost about $100.
Grand total of $825!
That's a pretty cheap upgrade and I couldn't be happier!
I hope you were inspired like I was.
Thanks for reading. Have a blessed day!
Alex
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