Kitchen Update
This post may contain affiliate links. If you click and purchase through one of my links, I may receive commission at no additional cost to you.
After years of renting and waiting for the perfect time and circumstances, we bought our first home in the fall of 2020. It was a very exciting season for our family, and very exhausting to say the least! Once we signed all the docs and got the keys in mid October, we gave ourselves two weeks to do as many updates as possible. Those two weeks went by very quickly! We lived in Eudora at the time, I was a SAHM that worked part time, Kyle was working full time, and our new house is in Olathe. So we spent a lot of time driving back and forth and a lot of nights painting the new house at midnight while our daughter was sleeping.
We like to save a buck (or thousands) by doing things ourselves, which means a lot of trial and error and a lot of imperfect finishes.
In the two weeks between getting keys and move-in day, we painted more than half of the interior’s walls, replaced all baseboards, updated the upstairs carpet, updated the guest bathroom, replaced half of our fencing in the backyard, and updated the kitchen. If you’d like to see all of the before/after videos and some real-time footage, check out my “New Home” highlights on my instagram page.
The kitchen update was a big undertaking that I wanted to do all by myself, but thankfully my MIL helped quite a bit with painting the cabinets! I wish I did a better job at documenting all of the details of our kitchen update, but for you to see how some paint and new hardware transforms a space, check out these before and after photos!
Things I wanted to update in the kitchen before moving in:
Paint the walls
Refinish concrete countertops
Paint cabinets
Add gold hardware
Replace stove & microwave (we couldn’t find a microwave to fit this exact space, so we decided to keep the old one for now)
I had never painted cabinets or refinished concrete, so I did a lot of research ahead of time. Come to find out, there was very little information out there at the time for how to refinish concrete countertops and no one at the home improvement stores knew either. The looks I got during this time were comical, and I got some comments like “you’ll have to come back and tell us how it turned out”. My ability was doubted, but once I get my mind on something, I figure out a way to make it happen. And I did!
Needless to say, two years later, I will never refinish my own concrete countertops again ;) Ha! It worked for us at the time, and I am proud of how it turned out, but if finances allowed, I would hire the professionals next time! (swallowing my pride as I say that)
If you would like to tackle your own kitchen cabinet update, I will share our system and products we used!
The cabinets were in OK condition. We couldn’t afford to replace the cabinets so a little elbow grease and paint was going to have to do! Our house was built in the 1980’s so it was covered in orange-y toned wood EVERYWHERE. Trim, baseboards, cabinets, built-ins… everything. Ick.
Once I knew I wanted two toned cabinets, with white on top, blue on the bottom, and gold hardware to accent, it was go time!
First things first. LABEL EVERYTHING. Don’t skip this step. You might think you’ll remember which cabinet goes where, but one little mistake and you could paint a door the wrong color! You will want to know which cabinets go where, and the coordinating hardware (if you are reusing hardware). Since we didn’t live at the house yet, all I had was a paper plate, sharpie, and painters tape to make my master drawing. ;) Not professional looking, but hey, it did its purpose!
Once the cabinets were removed it was time to tape and cover anything we didn’t want to get paint on. Since I had refinished the countertops first, I made sure those were covered with drop cloths before getting started.
Next it was time to clean. And clean. And clean. Years of build up were on the cabinets so I literally went through a whole bottle of Krud Kutter and several rags. I haven’t tried this Krud Kutter, but on my next paint project I will! I called in reinforcements and asked Kyle to help with this step too. Wear gloves and ventilate if possible for this and the remaining steps. It’s important to not skip this cleaning step- you don’t want to attempt painting dirty cabinets. Once they are nice and clean you can move to the next step!
3. Time to sand! Oh wait- sanding cabinets would be a very tedious task! I would throw in the towel if I had to sand. Save yourself hours of sanding and dust covering everything with Liquid Sander. THIS STUFF IS GOLD. Follow the directions on the bottle to safely and effectively use this product. If you watch my instagram stories from this project, you’ll see that I did end up using an electric sander on some of the cabinets to get off layers of build-up that the cleaner just didn’t work on some spots. Hopefully you don’t run into this problem, so using liquid sander without needing sandpaper should be just fine!
4. Now for the primer! We use this Zinsser primer for all of our paint projects! One coat of primer should be all you need, but there have been instances, like the doors in our house, that required two coats of primer because it was such dry wood it soaked it all up. We painted the cabinets with brushes and rollers for this step!
5. Top coat time! We went with Behr Interior/Exterior Urethane Alkyd Satin Enamel. The kind gentleman at Home Depot sold me on this paint for wood/cabinetry in high traffic areas. It’s been two years and the paint has held up great except in the few spots that our toddler has rammed a toy full force into the cabinets. They clean up well and look good! For the base of the cabinets (part attached to the wall), we used brushes and rollers. The doors and cabinets, however, were painted with a paint sprayer to give a clean finish.
6. I would suggest waiting at least 48 hours, if not more, to let the paint cure before putting doors or drawers back on. We waited a full week to do this step since we were going to be drilling new holes for the hardware. I’m glad we waited as long as possible, so that we didn’t run into the drawers sticking and peeling the new paint off.
7. Put all doors and drawers back in the right places! If you followed my first step, all the doors and drawers should go back in the right place without any issues!
8. We threw out the old hinges, so I ordered these, and added pulls/handles. The cabinets didn’t have any handles prior, but I wanted to have a modern, finished look so I ordered these.
We took about a week to complete this project, because we were working on several others at the time, but you could repaint your kitchen using these steps in a full weekend if you have the days to devote to it!
We are far from professionals and the finished product isn’t perfect, but we are very pleased with how this update turned out! It completed transformed the space which is what we were hoping for!
