FINALLY!!
We are finally done with re-staining our kitchen cabinets!
Here is the "Before" picture.
(Excuse the crying baby & lovely mess, I didn't think to take a picture before we started prepping and making a big mess.)
And here is the "After". I LOVE how it looks now! Such an improvement!
It was about a two and a half week process to get the kitchen done, from the start of the first section to putting on the last cabinets. It seems much longer because we started the staining adventure on our Master Bath cabinets back in January, knowing that the kitchen was our ultimate project if we liked how the bathroom turned out.
After the time and effort involved in getting the bathroom and stair banister done, I was NOT excited to do the kitchen (we have a lot of cupboards in there!). But Josh is not a procrastinator at all, and he wanted to get it done. We decided to do it in sections to try to make it a little easier on ourselves. We started on what we (or I) thought would be the easiest small section to get it going. I was wrong, it was probably the hardest section that we could've picked. Blah, it wasn't very fun, but we eventually got it all done! And it was worth all of the hard work and pain. (I don't recommend taking on a project like this when you are 7 months pregnant!)
Doesn't this look so much better!?
Here is a picture of my little wanna-be helper. I tried to get the coats done while she would be sleeping since she would be on a mission to destroy everything. But every once in a while she would wake up earlier than I needed and she would stand at the baby gate and talk to me while I worked.
We spent a lot of time on the floor of the garage putting multiple coats of stain and clear coat on the pieces. Josh is very happy to finally have his parking spot back!
Here are some pictures of the kitchen partly done...
And now some pictures of it all done!
There are still things we want to do in here, like run a gas line and get a nice stainless gas stove and microwave, oh and a stainless dishwasher. We would like to put in some granite counter tops at some point also. We were planning on doing the granite ASAP, but with the new cabinets the older counters don't look as bad so we probably won't rush that as much now.
Anyways..... That's our newly improved kitchen! I love it, it makes me happy every time I walk in!
(I'm also SO happy to be done with the staining! at least until Josh wants to get the 2 guest bathrooms done too, sigh)
4 comments:
Did you guys sand everything and then stain or did you just stain over top? I'm hoping you just stained over top because I sanded and stained a huge hutch when I was about 7 mo pregnant and I slept for like 2 days after that. It made me so tired!! I love your "new" kitchen. Did you guys do multiple coats or did it just give you that nice deep color on the first application? You guys are so rad for doing all of these DIY projects. I am totally like that too, although I don't have my own house so I do whatever my parents want me to do on their house (with their money). I think when you DIY you think about how great it looks more often than if you were to pay somebody. Whenever I pay people for doing things I could do myself I just feel a little ripped off! :) Sorry, last question: did you guys look at a bunch of tutorials before doing your bathroom floors a while back or is your husband just a handy man who knows how to do stuff like that? Oh, and if you redo your counter tops on your own you're going to have to let me know how that goes because I TOTALLY want to know details on that.
it looks soooooooooooooooooo good! josh you should start a side business. i'm tellin' ya. and so should you jen, with making aprons and blankets and baby books for church :) i love you all
Doreen,
We used a really fine sanding block on them to take off the layer of clear coat on the old cabinets. It doesn't take much effort, it's just so the new stuff can apply better I think. We did 3 coats of the stain, and then 3 coats of the clear coat on top. I liked the coloring of the first and second coats, but you could see all of the strokes from applying the stain so we went with 3 coats which makes everything look clean.
I did do a lot of searching online, like pinterest and goggle, about different products and tutorials. I narrowed it down to this product and another kind by Rustoleum that came in a whole boxed kit thing. That kit was much more expensive and covered less cabinet space so I went with the kind we used. I also found a great tutorial that showed and explained the steps pretty good. Here's the link http://www.monicawantsit.com/2012/02/staining-oak-cabinets-espresso-color.html
And here is a link to the stain I bought (I used the cheapest place I could find it since the big Box stores don't carry it) http://www.woodcraft.com/product/2005555/16545/general-finishes-java-gel-stain-quart.aspx
We had to use 2 quarts of stain on our kitchen because of all of the cabinets we had. (only one quart of the clear coat though). It was totally worth the work and didn't cost very much to accomplish. With the gloves/socks/painters tape/painters triangles, it was less than $200.
Josh is really handy and can figure out how to fix or do almost anything. Googling helps us out a lot too, lol. The tiling of the floors was actually really easy to do and kind of fun too. Just buy or rent a cheap tile saw.
Beth,
What makes you think Josh did all of this?? ;P
I am pretty sure I did at LEAST 50% of the work on these stupid cabinets.
*sigh* I get no credit ;(
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