Remodeling My Kitchen Part I: The Cabinets

In these times of economic recession, it is difficult to come up with money enough to change completely our kitchen. We asked The Home Depot to come to our house and calculate how much it would cost to renew the kitchen on our new house. Without changing the kitchen cabinets, only refacing them, they would charge us more than ten thousand dollars. Even with the tax return money we won’t have money enough for this remodeling. So we decided to investigate, and we checked around the Internet and the several DIY TV shows, such as HGTV, trying to find a cheaper way to remodel the kitchen.

The biggest problem that our kitchen has is that is absolutely outdated. The cabinets’ color is this plain and sad brown, and the countertops are made of the cheapest laminated material, and they are full of stains. The appliances are old and mismatched.

We had a tight budget, so we can expend lots of money remodeling the kitchen. We decided to reface it instead of remodel it. This means that we won’t change everything that is in the kitchen, we decided to fix it and give it a new more modern look.

The cabinets, although ugly and outdated, were made with high quality materials, and they were in excellent shape. So we decided to paint them. We went to check the different kitchen cabinets they show in the Home Depot and Lowes, and we liked one specific color. It is called Butterscotch maple, and is a creamy white, rimmed in dark to look antique. Our walls are painted in different shades of brown, so a clear color would look perfect.

But the first problem we found was that the cabinets’ doors are made in plywood, no real wood, and the first thing experts tell you is that you don’t paint plywood. They say that you can’t sand plywood, and that it doesn’t take the paint. Well, we sanded the plywood. Slowly and lightly, but we sanded it. After we sanded it, we apply the primer, a normal primer for wood. And we painted all the cabinets. After we painted them, we used a special pencil to mark the rims, we founded in Michael’s for five dollars. And we bought a set of handlers for the cabinets’ doors and drawers.

If you have problems with the paint, because the plywood is not taking it, don’t hesitate in using spray paint. Good quality spray paint is the perfect solution for these cases.

If you don’t want to paint the cabinet’s doors you can paint only the rest of the cabinets and order new doors the same color than the rest of the cabinets. That will be cheaper than buy new whole cabinets.

You can also measure the size of the center part of the front of the cabinets’ doors, and buy pieces of wood the exact size. You can attach that pieces to the fronts of the doors and paint them.

The next challenge we faced in the kitchen was the countertops. But that is another article. Keep reading me!