Kitchen Cabinet Refinishing, Part 1: The Preparation

The kitchen renovation plan is by far the most ambitious of all of our early DIY projects for the house. We're pretty picky, and didn't like any of the updated kitchens we saw in the other mid-century houses we looked at buying. We were actually quite happy to find a house with a kitchen that was basically a blank slate: we had the opportunity to do whatever we want with the space. Our vision is a very sexy, modern kitchen, with keeping much of the original layout.

Original kitchen at purchase

We learned from a neighbor who has lived on the street for decades that the original owners raised their family in this house and lived here for about 40 years. Then there was a couple who lived here for about 5 years, putting in all the garden boxes and newer fruit trees. Then a single person for a couple years before it was foreclosed and vacant, which is when we scooped it up.

As you can see below, at some point someone decided to paint the lower cabinets brown, while leaving the upper cabinets white with yellow doors, the same yellow also found throughout the living room and hallway. They were terrible.

Nick putting in a new brushed nickel faucet here

We began by removing all of the cabinet doors. While the cabinet bases were solid wood and our plan was to strip the paint and stain them, the doors were not worth keeping. I gave them away for free through Craigslist. The cabinet bases were made for inset doors but the current ones were overlay, leaving a gap. We prefer the look of inset doors, with hinges hidden inside, so that was what we started looking at for replacements.

Removing the yellow doors and leaving just the white cabinets open made it look a lot better already, especially with the new paint throughout the space, but the real work was yet to come.

July 2013. New paint in kitchen, throughout hall and in master bedroom

Soon after moving in September, I started my work in the kitchen during the day while Nick was at his new job. Below you can see we actually have things in the cabinets! Not kidding when I said we were living within the mess of a renovation project. And the smells of a renovation project, as I was using a chemical gel paint stripper to remove what turned out to be approximately 6 coats of paint from the cabinets, most of which were pastel colors. It was so thick that most areas needed a second layer of chemical to strip the remaining paint, and I could only do small sections at a time. Not only that, but the gel had to sit on the paint for at least a half an hour before scraping it off. This was a very slow process.

This area was done in three sections, each needing two applications of paint stripper

This was by far my least favorite house project because progress was so hard to see. I can't remember exactly, but it took about two weeks to get the cabinets to the point shown below. The fan in the window was pulling the chemical smell and pushing it OUT. Not great to breathe, but most days it was nice enough outside that between coats I could go work on stuff in the yard and get fresh air. You can see from the photo below also that the wood of the cabinet boxes goes all the way to the ceiling, and there's a large section running over the sink between the two upper cabinet sections. Yes, I stripped the paint off of ALL of this. 

After the top cabinets were done I started on the lower area, which had that extra layer of brown. Fortunately the lower cabinets went much more quickly because the only areas needing work were thin strips of wood between doors and drawers. The drawer fronts -- like the cabinet doors -- are going to be replaced, which meant we lived with them like that until the new fronts arrived.

Paint crackling on that corner piece, nearly ready for scraping

Nearly done!

You can see above that this was done before we put down the tile. I don't think the gel would have done any damage had it come in contact with the tile or grout, but better to finish the messiest project first, just in case. 

There were a few areas I had to go over with a third coat of gel and scrape with a tiny tool. I also used the hand-held random orbital sander to sand all of the cabinets. Below is a closeup of the large end of one of the upper cabinets after sanding. Notice the small greenish marks near the top of the photo? Those are where the person who originally painted these used spackle to fill the small finishing nail holes before painting.

Not sure of the wood type...

I wasn't optimistic, but I tried testing an area with old spackle to see if it would take the stain. It did not, so that added a few more days to the project. I used a small dental-like tool to scrape all of the old nail hole filling out of the wood, all over the cabinets, and fill them with new stainable wood filler. There were a LOT of these holes. Not to mention there were some areas where the wood needed some slight rebuilding to fill in areas that were uneven. After letting all of the areas dry, they needed sanding and wiping down before I could start staining. Oh and the picture below shows an area that for some reason was just really loaded with holes. The rest wasn't too bad.

Upper nail holes scraped empty and ready for wood filler.
Lower holes are what they looked like before.

The photo above and below also gives a peek at what we're doing with the cabinet interiors. They definitely needed a new coat of paint and we wanted to give the kitchen a pop of color when opening the cabinets since they are going to be on the darker side. So we decided on this great avocado-like green. I held off on painting the rest until the cabinet base wood was stained. To be continued soon...