Painting the Kitchen Cabinets Pt 2 - Cabinet Removal

Here was my game plan for the kitchen cabinet project:

Round 1 (Thur-Sat, an hour Th, a couple hours on fri, then the rest sat afternoon/evening):

• remove doors/hardware
• clean
• sand (to remove the polyurethane coat)
• prime

Round 2 (hopefully sun):

• paint (2 coats, but I don't plan on painting the cabinet interiors)

Round 3 (the following sat&sun)

• put down contact paper
• install new hardware
• rehang doors

I'm naive. I thought removing the cabinets and the hardware was going to be easy, if a bit monotonous. I actually thought I could get all 20 doors removed in an hour last night. I grossly underestimated.

Actual cabinet doors removed: 11
Actual time spent: 1.5 hours

Remaining Cabinet doors: 9
Remaining hardware removal from doors/drawers: 40 hinges (or put another way, 120 screws) and 25 handles (or 50 large bolt screws)
Time remaining: I bet it's more than an hour

Stupid screws. And I only would have been able to remove the lower ones had Adam not given me his ladder when he moved to Australia. Thanks Adam! I tried doing the upper cabinets with just my little IKEA step stool, but reaching above my head to remove super tight, semi-stripped screws was not working. Thankfully the ladder gave me the leverage I needed, but my arms and hands just couldn't take doing all 20. Not to mention, every time I was on it, just on the second step with one foot on my counter, my brain was half occupied with thoughts of the ladder collapsing and me breaking various bones. I have decent balance and am probably less clumsy than your average person thanks to volleyball and surfing, but I swear, you raise me 20 inches off the ground and all of a sudden I get locked knees and my legs are shaky from the effort of trying to hold myself still.

So instead of taking one night to get the cabinets down, it will take two. I'm doing it manually with a screwdriver because it didn't look like a drill could reach the screws on the hinges (TIP: I switched to a short neck screwdriver, it's about 3.5 inches long, and it makes getting the tough ones out much easier!). Plus me operating a drill is about as successful as a dog opening a jar. I just can't do it. Which friend am I going to pay low wages to help me rehang them because that will require drilling? =)

I got half the cabinets down!

Needless to say my planned schedule is already shot since I overlooked little details like: how much a screwdriver hurts my hands after an hour, the fact that I have to fill and sand all the holes left by the screws, and how long it'll take to hand sand the archs and edges on the doors (at least I have Adam's hand sander for the flat stuff). I'll be lucky if I can even get to priming this weekend thanks to the hardware!

In the meantime, my cat Jackson is enjoying the open access to the lower cabinets which he likes climbing in the back of (he does it when the doors are on too, using his little nose to work the doors open. Yes, that means there is cat hair on my baking pans. And yes I rinse them before I use them. Most of the time...)

And for anyone concerned, don't worry, I numbered my doors and made a map so I piece this puzzle back together correctly!

Painting the Kitchen Cabinets

I'm about a year and a half behind on blogging, but I'm going to catch up! I promise to fill you in on all the fun updates and purchases in a series of posts in the coming weeks, but for now, let's focus on the current project: updating the kitchen cabinets.

I would love brand new cabinets, but I'm not willing to invest $5k in new cabinets for this house, so a paint and hardware face lift it is! If HGTV, Trading Spaces, and Color Splash all say it's good for my kitchen, it must be true.

I've owned my home for just over two years now. And since day one I've been talking about painting the kitchen cabinets. I even bought the paint. A year ago.

First let me tell you how much I hate my cabinets. The only thing they have going for them are that they're real wood. But they're straight out of the 80s country kitchen scene. They have tacky gold handles, the hinges are some other color that doesn't match, and they're this ugly arched grooved style. I don't know the name, so let's just call it Country Eye Sore. I would love love love to have some square, simple cabinets. Instead, I have these:


I had a false start on motivation about 2 months ago when I took the doors and hardware off the single cabinet in the breakfast nook - it was to be my test run. I got as far as cleaning the doors, then they sat on the nook bench, enjoying the view for the summer.

This week I finally got serious. I did some internet research and looked at what other people had done.

Why research, when I had already bought the paint a year ago? Well, I bought white paint. I still want white cabinets. But my entire kitchen and nook have white tile on the floor. Tile that would take me days to tear out and replace (I removed about 13 squares of it in the entryway when I first moved in and it took 4 hours of backbreaking work. There are over 100 squares in the kitchen).

Current state of my kitchen, August 10, 2011. Envy my white tile floor an peach tile counters/backsplash.

Now I know all white rooms are all the rage for rockstars, Bravo Real Housewives, and people who live in Miami, but I don't think that applies to kitchens in Rolando. So I decided I would paint the lower cabinets a different color but paint the upper ones white as originally planned. After my research, I decided some light gray, green, or taupe color would contrast nicely. Kind of like this:


After reading a helpful how-to blog post on Young House Love, I headed off to Home Depot to purchase a few things:

• Oil-based primer
• Wood filler
• Good rollers
• Paint brush
• Lots of sandpaper
• Cleaning gloves
• Painter's tape
• 8 gazillion paint swatches

Grand total: $79 (but only $29 b/c I used my birthday gift card from Stephen - thanks, man!)

Still to purchase:

• Lower cabinet paint
• New hardware (I just heard my wallet gasp...)
• Contact paper for the shelves

Tonight I begin disassembling the kitchen and cleaning years of gunk off the doors.

Read Painting the Kitchen Cabinets Pt. 2: Cabinet Removal
Read Painting the Kitchen Cabinets Pt. 3: Before & After