Ami’s First DIY – Painting Her Kitchen Cabinets!

When you have cabinets that look…..dated, what can you do to make them look fancy again? Back when I was a first time homeowner, we had to spend our money on things like a new furnace and new rugs rather than superficial things like new cabinets. But these old kitchen cabinets were orange. Like, seriously orange and no unqualified accessories were going to help solve their problem.

What’s a broke newlywed to do? We decided that the quality of the cabinets wasn’t high enough to try to refinish them and stain them a nicer color, so we opted to paint them. We matched a dusty tan color from the counter top and jumped in.

What We Did –

First, we set up some plastic drop cloths in a guest room. Wished we had space in the garage, but it was full of everything that wasn’t unpacked yet. We took off the doors of the cabinets and set them up on the plastic. It ended up taking forever because we could only do one side at a time and then had to wait for it to dry. The edges were tough to get because something had to lean against the wall. We primed one side, let it dry overnight, flipped it over and primed the other side, waited the day or overnight and flipped and applied the first coat of paint. Luckily, it gave us plenty of time to easily move the dishes around in the cabinets as we discussed where we wanted to keep everything.

Back in the kitchen, we had to deal with painting the boxes and drawers. Lots of plastic and dripped paint later and we had relatively nice looking cabinet boxes. I think we only painted one drawer closed. We also decided to add new hardware as the current set was as dated as the color.

Once the doors were dry, we put the hinges back on (does anyone ever remember to label the pieces to make it easier later??) and re-assembled the cabinets. It took some trial and error and several trips up and down the ladder to get everything straight, but in the end the cabinets looked much better and the whole feel of the room was much improved!

All told, it took 2 solid weekends of working on this, plus flipping the cabinet doors and recoating every day.

See that orange skylight? Yeah, we really should have painted that, too…

Would I Do It Again?

We had to invest a lot of sweat equity into our first home to really polish it up without going further into debt (we laid those wood floors, too!). This particular kitchen didn’t need to have a super polished look as it was more of a country style home in a rural area. I wouldn’t hesitate to paint lower quality cabinets that needed a facelift because brushing and rolling them like we did is certainly more cost-effective than replacing or refinishing them. But for a more formal space or in a higher-end home I would definitely invest in a professional company to bring in their sprayer and make the application look flawless.

If you would like to hear about how our team can save you time and refresh your cabinets, give us a call! We would be happy to talk over your cabinet painting project with you and help in any way we can.