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...

Dining/Kitchen Decorative Shelving Removal

The overall goal for the house is to make it feel more modern and open. One of the things we decided early on needed to happen was removal of these two rounded shelves shown below. Located on the end of what I like to call 'the peninsula,' they protruded 8 inches into the walkway between the dining room and kitchen, and we would rather have the space than the shelves. And clutter-free living means getting rid of such unnecessary areas where junk tends to collect.

In the above photo, I've already removed the metal edging from both and taken the laminate off of the bottom shelf. It's the same terrible laminate as the countertop. 

Removing these were trickier than we first thought they'd be. It turns out that the shelves were not attached independently to the peninsula, but were built-in: they were extensions of the two drawer bases on the other side. My tools for this job were a crow bar, several chisels, and a drill.

Bottom shelf gone!

First I tried just using the chisel and hammer along the peninsula, but that wasn't enough to get through the wood. I ended up having to drill holes as close as I could get to the peninsula, which means that after hammering and chiseling along the edge where I had drilled I was left with dozens of small holes I needed to fill with spackle. No problem. 

Both shelves gone!

It's hard to see in the above photos, but they actually cut out the upper area of the trim to fit under the bottom shelf. When I filled the gouges with spackle, I also carefully sculpted spackle onto the trim to make it look like it was whole across the whole section. It may have looked ok uneven, but if I'm going to do all this work, I might as well do it right.

The last thing that needed to be done to get the true feel of the final dining/kitchen layout was cutting back the rounded countertop edge above where the shelves used to be. When we replace the countertop, we are only going to have the edge extend about an inch or so, whatever is standard. Below is where I drew a line and cut the counter top with a circular saw. After removing ~7 inches from the end of the counter, I was able to move the refrigerator over because the door was now free to open entirely without hitting it.

Notice the new floor!

With a single coat of paint on and the shadow of the counter top gone, I could more easily see where I still needed to fill and sand again, so I did that:

And then painted another few coats to finish both the upper section and the trim:

So much better than the original! Nick still needs to write his kitchen floor post, but you can see above what that looks like. And you can see a sneak peak at what the cabinets are looking like now compared to below...

Floor Prep

Even with four days of painting we didn't get everything completed. The studio/guest room still needs to be painted but refinishing the floor took priority for the rest of the week. 

The floors were really dull and very worn. There were some water spots in the living room and black marks that resembled tire treads on some of the bedroom floors, which was probably transfer of some kind from carpet pads back when they were carpeted. 

Dining area before

Living room before

Nick spent Friday morning sanding the wood floor throughout the house while I used the vacuum to clear out all of the dust so he could see the areas he'd already done and where he still needed to sand. I ended up vacuuming 4 or 5 more times after he was finished in order to make sure we got all of the dust and anything else that might have been on the floor.

Nick sanding the studio/guest room

He had to spend extra time on areas like the one below, but was able to reduce these marks significantly!

Tire tread-like marks in bedrooms from carpet pad 

It took several hours of sanding, but the floors were finally ready. We had an appointment to have the fireplace inspected that afternoon, so as soon as that was over Nick started with the polyurethane. Here are photos of the living room and dining area sanded and ready to be refinished:

Living room sanded

Dining room sanded