Home Project 6: "New" Cabinets

With the kitchen beginning to enter the 21st century after a couple projects (see the first one and the second one), it was time to move on to updating the kitchen cabinets. Again, here is a picture of the kitchen after buying the house.



Those are fine cabinets, say, for a cabin in the woods or on the side of a mountain, but not so much for a modern kitchen. But, instead of spending thousands of dollars putting in all new custom cabinets (which would have no doubt looked great if we had the money) we went cheap and decided to see how they looked if we painted them white. The first step in the process was to detach all the doors and hardware. After giving them a sand and a putty (or was it the other way around), it was time to use the one home improvement skill I have: Painting.



Can't forget to paint the actual cabinets as well. Look at that happy painter...



Man that guy never smiles when he's doing house renovations. Using a bit of strategery on our part, we were able to paint the front of the cabinets without removing any dinnerware. Brilliant! And only a couple of plates ended up white.



After two coats of paint and some new handles and hinges from ACE hardware, and we've got some pretty decent looking white cabinets.



One note about the hardware. If you have the old school wrap around hinges like you see in the picture above, and a wife, it becomes vitally important to exactly match the color of the handles to the hinges. In that case, don't make the mistake I did and buy non-returnable aged pewter color handles before buying any hinges. As I quickly discovered, hinges generally come in three general colors: brass, nickel, and aged bronze. None of those come all that close to matching the color of aged pewter. After scouring the Internet and about 8 different hardware stores, I finally found one type of hinge that matched the color of the handles. Total time that we were without cabinet doors: 2 weeks.