Ideas and Sources for Adding Antique Kitchen Cabinets
Uniform Style or Mix and Match Kitchen Cabinets – When choosing a look for your antique kitchen cabinets, you have three choices. You can purchase real antiques and mix and match them in with newer pieces, you can purchase new kitchen cabinets with an antique look to them, or you can change your current kitchen cabinets to get an antique feel. What you decide to use depends on what you are most comfortable with, your d-i-y skill level, and your patience for going on the hunt for true antiques.
Age of the Cabinet – Real Antique or Fake? – When you think antique kitchen cabinet, do you want cabinets that are really old or do you want cabinets that just look that way. If you want authentic antique kitchen cabinets, you will probably be adding pieces of furniture that originally served other purposes. Some possibilities include large blanket chests and armoires (or the older clothes press), large hutches with shelves, apothecary chests, and corner cupboards. Other pieces will be actual antique kitchen pieces such as dry sinks (kitchen cabinets from the 1800’s with a shallow basin on top), and the more recent oak iceboxes, pie safes, and Hoosier-type flour cabinets.
If you decide to use real antiques for your kitchen cabinets, prepare to spend some time and expense looking for the perfect pieces. Look through magazines (such as Traditional Home, Better Homes and Gardens, and Country Living) and tear out the pictures of items and kitchen arrangements using antique cabinets that appeal to you. Compare your kitchen to the pictures. Is your kitchen large enough to incorporate true antiques to be used as kitchen cabinets? If so, what storage do you need and how big can the antique cabinets be? Carry a tape measure and small camera or camera phone with you at all times. You never know when you’ll see a cabinet possibility in a secondhand shop or even along the side of the road.
Re-purposing an Antique Piece as a Kitchen Cabinet – If you find some antique pieces that you want to include in your kitchen, you may come to the realization that they won’t work for you exactly as they are. At that point you must come to a decision, do you wish to modify the antique to make it work for you? This will involve extra money and, you will be reducing the value of the antique in almost every case. I am of the opinion that the best antiques to re-purpose for your kitchen are those that already have a flaw to them. Someone may have already cut off the legs or ruined the finish with a bad restoration job. There may be insect or other structural damage, or there may be a new back on the piece, reducing its value.
Antique pieces with a little damage on them are great candidates for using as antique kitchen cabinets. You can usually get them for a bargain price and you can modify them to suit your needs without feeling like you are destroying a valuable antique.
An important consideration about using true antique pieces, you must appreciate an eclectic style if you want to use antiques as kitchen cabinets. For years, we’ve been programmed to accept the matching cabinets at Lowes, Home Depot and finer cabinet stores as the kitchen norm. If you are happier with the matching look it would be better to choose new kitchen cabinets instead of true antiques for kitchen cabinets. It isn’t worth the time, money, and effort it will take to find these true antiques if you won’t be happy with an eclectic mix of them in your kitchen.
Modern Options for Antique Kitchen Cabinets – If you’d rather not hunt down the true antiques, there are other ways to make your kitchen cabinets look antique. If you are purchasing new kitchen cabinets, you can have them custom made to your specifications to look like antiques.
If you are looking at cabinets from places like Lowes and Home Depot, your new kitchen cabinets will look more antique if you choose darker colors (think cherry and walnut) and details such as bead board and certain moldings. Again this is good time to refer to magazines to compare the antique look you are searching for with kitchen cabinets that are readily available in the stores.
The other option is to turn your current kitchen cabinets into antique kitchen cabinets. Some of us are already well on our way to accomplishing this task. If you’ve had your kitchen cabinets for awhile, they’ve probably suffered a few dings and dents along the way. This is a great start towards the antique look. Antique kitchen cabinets should have the “distressed look.”
If you are going to paint or re-stain to “antique” your kitchen cabinets, add distressing as part of your prep work. Some great distressing tools are nails, pieces of small chain that you can use to hit your cabinets, hammers, and sandpaper. Don’t overdo it. This is one of those cases where less is more. Also think about where you place the distress marks. They need to be placed where cabinets normally face wear and tear. An example would be where you would open the kitchen cabinet door, for instance.
Once you’ve distressed your cabinets, you can choose to stain or paint them. Here are some ideas on painting cabinets to get you started on thinking about the steps involved.
Final Tips for Antique Kitchen Cabinets – If you are unsure what an antique piece, such as a dry sink, for instance, looks like then use Google Images to view pictures of different pieces. You will get ideas of all types, shapes, and sizes of antique dry sinks and how they might be used for antique kitchen cabinets.
Use other details to enhance your antique kitchen cabinets such as counter-tops of wood, copper, or tin. Some tile may work as well. Don’t forget your porcelain sink.
Use antique newel posts and maybe even bead board siding along your bar for an antique look and to accentuate your antique kitchen cabinets. If you are using new cabinets or updating your current kitchen cabinets, consider adding stained glass to some of the doors, or building multiple shelves supported by spindle legs salvaged from antique pieces of furniture. Use bead-board and old molding salvaged from old houses to antique your current cabinets. Antique knobs can finish out the look for your current kitchen cabinets or be used on brand new kitchen cabinets.
Sources for Antique Kitchen Cabinets – For true antique kitchen cabinet possibilities, check garage sales, flea markets, estate sales, secondhand stores, Goodwill, Ebay, Craigslist, the classifieds, and, of course, auctions and antique stores.
Architectural antique stores are great resources for finding old lumber, bead-board, and molding to make your current cabinets look like antique kitchen cabinets.
