sam's white cabinet transformation
You see all our white paint on this side black shelf because we will be painting it jade green next. It is hard to work around!
We stained our floating shelves with Danish oil in the color Walnut.
This weekend we decided to tackle the project of painting our oak cabinets white. We used Rust-Oleum's Cabinet Transformation Kit in pure white. I heard amazing things about this kit and we couldn't pass up the opportunity to get our cabinets done in a weekend without stripping or sanding. This kit runs $75 and includes deglosser, tinted white paint, and the protective coat finish. It also includes a decorative glaze optional step that is pictured on the cover of the box below. Not our style, so we just stuck with the plain white. We also decided to purchase new hardware pulls and pull bars that ran about $80. All in all, refinishing our cabinets for around $150 so was worth all the work!
Our before picture:
We started by removing all our doors and drawers and scrubbing everything down with this GP66 Cleaner. We used microfiber cloths and they were literatlly black by the end becuase of all the grease and grime it was taking off.
Next we started our workstation by laying out all the doors on the sawhorse and the drawers set up on the ground. We drew a map of our kitchen and numbered all the doors and drawers. I of course, messed up and we lost track of a couple.
Before doing anything else we drilled the new holes for the hardware and numbered them in cups according to their door/drawer.
According to the directions this deglosser is Step 1, but as you can see there was quite a bit of prep work. The green sponges were included and you just pour this deglosser directly on the sponge and brutally wipe down the cabinets. This chemical really meant business, because when my glove broke it completely deglossed my skin.
The cabinets were left with this soapy looking residue and it took off all of their shiny coating and a little bit of the orange color.
Next step is taping around all the cabinets. There is not enough material in the kit to do all the insides and shelves and we wanted to leave it as raw wood anyway.
Below picture is after the first coat. You can see the coverage is not complete here.
Don't decide to cook dinner in the middle of your wet paint and lean up against the sink drawer like I did. We also decided to put hardware pulls on these fake under the sink drawers. It made a nice difference!
We ended up doing three coats of paint and then the final protective coat. This is just a thin sealer that looks like milk but will protect the cabinet finish and prevent stains. In the end, we wished that we would have used a primer because there were a few spots that the yellow finish or a stain showed through the paint. We will just touch up as we see spots though!
Next steps are painting the bottom of the island and the side shelf a jade color and then stainless steel veneer-ing the fridge. We hope to get this done before the wedding but we'll see. Let me know if you have any questions about the process!
