Happy Monday y’all! I hope you had a fabulous weekend. The Mr. & I did; it was nice to not have too much work to do over the weekend. I’ve got some training this week and I’m a bit behind on planning for the fall semester so I’ve got to tackle that this week.
Ok, last week I showed y’all, what I like to call, our new
French Farmhouse Kitchen. Here is the before and after:
Today I’m going to show you how we painted our cabinets :-)
Since we did it all in a weekend, I’m going to tell you our timeline as well so that you know about how long it takes to do each step in a kitchen our size.
This is our kitchen before. I don’t think it was horrible, it just wasn’t my style.
Know what I mean?
FRIDAY
The first thing that we did after work (about 6pm) was clear out the contents of the cabinets. Dust was going to be everywhere so I put everything in the guest bedroom and shut the door (and the doors to the rest of the house for that matter in order to minimize how much cleanup we would have). Just for the record, I’m not sure how we have accumulated this much stuff in 7 months! We just purged so much right before we moved! FYI- Instead of putting a lot of this stuff back, it was donated!
We removed all of the hardware from the cabinet doors and drawers. We filled the holes in the cabinet doors with wood filler. The drawers were still going to have pulls (at the same size) so those didn’t need to be filled. But since I wanted knobs on the doors, those holes were going to have to be filled.
Yuckie hardware!!!
Being careful to keep things organized (you know me, hehe) each drawer and cabinet door was labeled so that they could go right back to where they came from when we were done with the entire project. Moving left to right, the upper cabinet doors were assigned numbers and the lower cabinet doors were assigned letters; in the same fashion drawers were assigned numbers. Using painters tape we labeled everything and then removed the doors and drawers from the cabinets.
You’ve got to keep each hinge with it’s own door or else when you go to rehang the doors they wont be level. So, once we removed each hinge, they were placed in a labeled baggie and placed in it’s corresponding cabinet space. We quickly realized that the tape was going to have to come off for us to sand and we didn’t want the cabinets getting mixed up, so we took a permanent marker and wrote it’s assigned number/letter in the hole were the hinge was. So in essence, we could have skipped the painters tape step. Now we were ready to get the show on the road….no turning back now!
The next step, which we think, was the hardest part of the entire project. And it certainly took the longest.
Sanding.
We borrowed 2 sanders from one of our dear friends, and ended up using a skill sander the most. The Mr. sanded all of the cabinet doors and drawers. You have to do this to get off the build-up that might be on there as well as any finishes. Sanding will help the paint to adhere. When sanding you want to be careful so don't get too crazy and go overboard. The goal is not to change the shape or structure of the door, just to clean it off to give you a fresh pallet to work with. After we the Mr. finished sanding the upper cabinets he brought them inside- you don’t want to leave them outside over night for debris to get on them. Then we were done for the day; we finished around 9:00pm. 
SATURDAY
First thing we had to do was find the coffee maker in the guest room! This was essential people!
Next we had to finish the sanding. The Mr. sanded all of the cabinets in the kitchen (Safety reminder: always wear safety glasses and a mask!), finished up the lower cabinet doors and all of the drawers. While he was doing this I was sanding hard to reach places by hand (i.e. the crown molding, floorboards, corners, and the groves that were in our cabinet doors). 
Yep, this also happened. lol
No, we didn't make them wear masks; it was just for a picture hehe
When we were done with the sanding (and a few trips to Lowe’s for more sand paper), I got to cleaning. The cabinets needed all of the dust to be absent so that we didn’t paint it on there and end up with chunky cabinets. Everything was wiped down, swept, and vacuumed at least 2 times. Don’t forget to clean inside your cabinets; those dust particles seem to travel, so get it all up! Everything was cleaned with diluted TSP followed by being wiped down with denatured alcohol. Be sure to wear gloves & a mask with these too. If you’re pregnant/nursing/plan-to-be-pregnant, get someone else to do this part. The denatured alcohol is especially important if you’ve got some parts of your kitchen cabinets that are not actually wood. This is typical for cabinets around the sink; instead of actual wood there is a vinyl paper covering something like particle board. Since you can’t sand this area, it needs to have that smoothness removed so that the paint will stick. Then after everything is cleaned, use a tack cloth to make sure you’ve got a super clean surface. You want to wear gloves with the tack cloth too, otherwise you will have some seriously tacky fingers for a while- I may or may not be speaking from experience ;-)
At this point it was about 4pm and we were finally ready to paint! Before painting, we put some tape on the shelves and sides of the drawers so that they wouldn’t get paint on them (and so we could move faster), and covered the counters with plastic. We used a great primer (zinsser bin primer) with sponge rollers and an angled brush for the hard to get places.
After we primed (only a single coat) we called it a day; we finished about 6:30pm.
SUNDAY
Today was painting day! We got up, showered, and ready to go by 7:30am. I would say that typically I’m a very decisive person, but picking paint for these cabinets was horrible! I guess because this seemed more permanent than painting a wall? I don’t know but I looked at a million shades of white….I had no idea there were that many in the first place so that was a news flash for me. I even got y’all to help me narrow it down when I found this website where you could upload a picture and try sample colors. The only problem was, was that they still all looked the same to me lol. Anyways I finally decided on Pure White from Sherwin Williams in Semi-Gloss, and I’m very happy with that choice. (Pure White was number 3)
While we watched listened to church online, we painted the first coat on everything using a sponge roller and an angled brush. The Mr. went to church to drop off doughnuts for Sunday School (since I completely forgot it was our week) while I finished painting the drawers. We cleaned the floor in the office, covered it with plastic and put the cabinet doors in there to dry. I called it the cabinet graveyard. lol It took about an hour for the first coat to dry, but we waited 4 hours before adding the second coat.
By 8pm on Sunday night we were rehanging the cabinet doors and putting in the drawers! Next we needed to add the new hardware for the cabinet doors and drawers. This took no time at all. The drawer pulls just went on using the same holes that were there before. For the cabinet doors, the Mr. drilled a single hole for each of the knobs (lining it up with the decorative lines on the cabinet doors), and I put on the knobs and that was that! Then we added new bumpers to the doors, because after all, we’ve put so much work into the kitchen I don’t want doors slamming in my kitchen; that wouldn’t be very peaceful at all! 
That is how we converted our kitchen in a single weekend! It was a lot of work to get it all done, but it was so fun to do together- a lot like taking a road trip. If you want to try this and you’ve got kiddos, I would send them to grandma's for the weekend so that you can tackle this project and get it done.
What do y’all think!?
Later this week I will tell y’all about light fixtures, plumbing issues, and bead board….exciting stuff, right?!?!?!
Happy Monday!
