Kitchen Cabinet Redo

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Over the past several months we have been working on painting my parent's kitchen cabinets.  My mom has been talking about it for a while and we finally decided to take the plunge.  Their house is as old as I am so it was definitely in need of an update.  

The dark oak cabinets made the kitchen very dark. It's amazing how much brighter the space looks!  My mom is talking about getting new appliances and counter tops too, but I think we are already off to a great start and a brand new space.

The first thing we did was remove all the doors, hinges, and hardware.   My dad was hoping that we would be able to reuse the old hardware, but they had way too much stuff built up on them from years of cooking in the kitchen.  Sean numbered the inside of each door behind the old hinges and drew a diagram so that we would know where to put them back when we were finished (which was such a brilliant idea and saved us a lot of time and frustration).

   

 Then he cleaned them all with TSP (which worked crazy well in taking off all of the gunk).Just remember to wear gloves while you're using it because it might melt the skin off your hands (probably not but better safe than sorry).

He sanded down all of the cabinets and frames lightly to get them ready for painting and we painted them with "gripper" primer from Home Depot.

I also did some organizing while we had all the cabinet doors off.  My mom was hating me during it but we got 4 huge tubs worth of things to donate to Goodwill and now you can easily find whatever you're looking for.  I even had fun using decorative baskets and labels.  Ahh, I love a good organization system!

We ended up buying a paint sprayer for a little over $100.  It was well worth it!  It gave a really professional finish to the cabinets and was a real time saver.  You do have to spend a loooong time cleaning it, but I still think it saved time in the end and the results were well worth it.

We went with "white linen" and bought the paint from Sherwin Williams, because they have a special paint specifically for cabinets.  It was definitely pricier, but hopefully it will hold up better and be a better investment down the line.  The color isn't a bright white but more of a subdued off white.

We also decided to go with a darker color for the kitchen island to add some visual interest.  I love the way it turned out and wanted to go home and paint my kitchen island right away....but, that thought ended when I got there and had 50 spit up covered toys to clean up and 3,000 loads of laundry to do.

before:

after:

 The color is "thunder grey" by Sherwin Williams.  This was actually just their Proclassic paint because apparently you can't get the cabinet paint in a dark color....lame.  But it was cheaper and looks really great.  You can't tell that the cabinets and island are a different type of paint either.

It looks brand new, and yes we got rid of that disgusting 30 year old trash can too (against my dad's wishes).  He is still complaining about missing that old trash can, go figure.

We decided to go with cup pulls and hinges in a dark oil rubbed bronze color that really pops off the light colored cabinets!

The light color really makes the backsplash pop too!  It's hard to see in the photographs but here is a close up:

We tried to tie in some of the grey when we picked out the island color.

It honestly took up like 5 months to finish.  My parents were so patient living in a kitchen with no cabinet doors for months and months.  With Sean's broken leg and trying to chase around our newly crawling baby it took quite a while.  But, was well worth it.