Renovations Are Fun

It’s finally happening! I’ve worked hard. I’ve saved my money and I am now on the road to renovating and redecorating my kitchen/living/dining room area. Open concept floorplans are great but change in these large areas creates an equally large mess. When your kitchen, living room and dining room are essentially one big room, you can’t renovate only one area. That would be weird. And ugly.

Living in a construction zone is enough to make anyone crazy, and me being the OCD organizer I am, I had a plan. (Side note – I like to organize, but I rarely am organized.) Anyhow, I had a plan. There were some tasks I planned to perform myself and some I was going to hire out. A detailed schedule of events was created, carefully orchestrated to maximize efficiency. You know, because renovations always go exactly according to plan.

One of the jobs I did myself was painting my kitchen cabinets. This needed to be done before any other work could start. The reasons for this are based in solid construction and renovation principles predicated on the fact that I make a huge mess when I paint, and I didn’t want to screw up anyone else’s hard work – especially if I was paying for that hard work.

If you have never painted cabinets before, I can tell you it isn’t too hard. Until last week, I had never done it either. You just need to use the right supplies and follow some step-by-step instructions. Because I love making lists, here are those step-by-step instructions:

Step One: Clean Out All Cabinets And Drawers

An untalked about bonus to painting your cabinets is having the chance to clean out all your hidden spaces and junk drawers. You don’t want to be using paint and chemicals around food items and utensils, so it makes sense to remove everything even if you aren’t painting the insides of the cabinets. This is a great opportunity to find open Pop Tarts and crackers someone shoved to the back of the top shelf before the mice do. Pro tip: You should definitely place all the items you remove somewhere close by in order to limit your workspace and maximize the number of times you trip over them.

Step Two: Degrease The Cabinets

This is a particularly important step. Any hardware store sells a degreasing concentrate you’ll use to clean the cabinets before you do anything else. The reason this is so important is because if you have kids in the house, your house is grosser than you think. My cabinets are eighteen years old. That means even though I’d wipe them down a few times a year during deep cleaning binges, they still had eighteen years’ worth of grime on them. Yum.

Step Three: Sanding

Alright. You’ve scrubbed off years of accumulated filth, now what? Sanding, that’s what. Don’t be afraid of this step, though. Unless you’re staining the cabinets and need to get down to bare wood, this is an easy step. Just use a medium grit sandpaper (the blocks work great and are easy to hold onto) and scuff away. This part isn’t rocket science. Pro tip: Don’t forget to repeatedly sand over your own hands like I did. Fine cuts and abrasions add to the DIY experience.

Step Four: Priming

Now we’re getting somewhere! This is the point when you can actually see progress. It’s shitty looking progress, but it’s progress nonetheless. This is the point when you will look at your primed wood and wonder if this was a really bad idea. Make sure you use a good primer specifically designed to adhere to hard to paint surfaces. I used Stix primer. Two coats. Worked great. Looked terrible until I used the actual paint.

Step Five: Painting

Ah. The moment you’ve been training for! This is the main event. I used a high gloss white paint. I’m realizing now I left a few details out of my previous instructions. I had my son remove all the cabinet doors and hardware for me. You’ll get much better results and less drips if you paint the doors while they lie flat. Factor in lots of drying time because you’ll need to do two coats and can only do one side at a time for obvious reasons. I also painted the sides of the cabinets in the space where the stove sits. Completely unnecessary because no one will ever see them, but I have overachieving OCD. Pro tip: Remember, and this is super important, when painting in tight spaces, swipe your hair through the fresh paint as much as possible. I sat on the floor in the small space for the stove and painted the sides of the cabinets. Not once, but twice (two coats, remember) I finished painting one side, turned to paint the other and smeared my ponytail through the wet paint. If you think you’re fancy and refuse to do this part, you’ll miss out on the next step.

Step Six: Spend The Next Week Picking Paint Out Of Your Hair

I don’t think this step needs detailed instructions. I’m going to assume you can figure it out. If you need help, though, watch a nature video where monkeys pick bugs out of each other’s hair. It’s a similar process. Just don’t eat the paint chips. You’ll also repeatedly answer the question “What’s in your hair?”. Or, if you’re as lucky as I was, you’ll grab a hair thinking it has white paint on it only to discover it is, in fact, just a white hair.

Tada! We’re done! My cabinets actually look great. The rest of my kitchen is a paint covered mess, but we’ll fix that soon enough. Although I probably gave you some real tips here, please don’t use my blog as a place for actual instructional information. If you need to know how to make a messy renovation even messier, though, I’m your girl.