Updating Kitchen Cabinets
Hello friends, I am showing you how we updated our kitchen cabinets without ripping them out and installing new ones. I am sharing the type of paint we used and how we made these cabinets look updated without breaking the bank.
Disclosure: some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no cost to you, I will earn commission if you click through and make a purchase.
We knew that one day after purchasing our new home, we would want to update the kitchen. We are still slowly doing this, but our first step in this update process was painting the cabinets. These days, many homeowners are opting to paint dated cabinets rather than replacing them. It is much more inexpensive and it saves you from having to rip out cabinets and wait for new ones to be installed. I am going to show you how we updated our kitchen cabinets.
The cabinets in our kitchen looked quite dated when we purchased the house. I am not a huge fan of the light oak color. It created a brown/yellow hue in our house. I needed a color that would brighten up the space and create a more open looking space. I knew that as soon as we painted the cabinets it would have a huge impact on this small space in our home.
How to Update Your Cabinets:
We initially thought we would do this process by ourselves. We have been doing a lot of the other paint jobs in our house, so I thought we would be great at this job as well. However, we had read so many other blogs and heard other homeowner’s experiences with this and after our research, we decided to hire someone. We wanted this to be done right. We wanted to make sure that the time it was taking us to update that it was done correctly and not a process that would create more problems in the future. Plus, doing this with three kids we knew would be a bit tricky and we would be short on time to complete this giant project.
However, even though we hired someone, we did pitch in to alleviate some costs and speed up the process. We also learned from the professionals what products to use and the entire process to make sure that it was done right.
Initially we had to remove all of the cabinet doors and hardware. We labeled all of the doors using painter’s tape making sure we could return the cabinet doors to it’s right location. Luckily, all of the hardware was the same throughout each of the cabinets, so we were able to unscrew the cabinet doors and place all of the screws in one bowl. We didn’t take off the hinges either. The painters simply painted around them.
After removing the doors, we had to pull everything out of the cabinets. I ended up with my pantry on my bedroom floor-ha ha.
The first step the painters took towards preparing the doors was sanding them down lightly. The reason behind this is to give the paint a better surface to hang onto. The areas on the cabinet doors that get touched the most would get sanded down a little bit more just so the paint wouldn’t chip off easily.
After sanding, the primer was applied. The primer used was SW quick dry stain blocking primer in white (interior/exterior).
Next, two coats of paint (we used SW emerald urethane trim enamel in high hide white semi glass) were applied to the cabinet doors. Once dried, they were hung back up on.
Gold Pulls are from Amazon.
It took about two whole weeks to get all of the cabinets in our house completed. We not only did the kitchen, but we painted the cabinets in the master bathroom, kids’ bathrooms and laundry room. Here’s a little peek into the other rooms:
In addition, we had the painters finish up the painting in the girls’ bedrooms. We never got to these rooms when we painted the house ourselves. Since we had painters in the house, we thought to have it done at the same time. Our oldest daughter wanted to keep her room a neutral color. We painted it SW Colonnade Gray . Our youngest daughter wanted a more soft color than the dark bluish teal color she had before. We painted her room SW Intimate White. It is not all the way white but has a hint of pink.
