Painting Kitchen Cabinets: BEFORE

When we bought our first home in 2005, our kitchen had these hideous hunter-green cabinet boxes with oak doors and floral-printed knobs. Really. Someone actually lived like this!

The rest of the house was pretty neutral, so I made it my mission to paint the cabinets. It took me a month. It was HORRIBLE. I swore I would never, EVER paint cabinets again. Ever. Although they did look pretty... I even made a kitchen island to match (maybe I will blog about it someday)!

I also vowed never to paint them again, simply because the paint wasn't that durable. I was constantly touching it up. It chipped, got dirty, and just generally gave me grief. NEVER AGAIN!

So, then we moved into our current house. And the cabinets were in much better shape, but...

They clashed with the floor. We have almost-200-year-old Southern Yellow Pine floors, and the cabinets were cherry. It was a lot of warm-colored-but-not-exactly-matching wood. And it drove me crazy. AND, since replacing the floor isn't going to be in the budget for a looooong time, I began to have these crazy thoughts about painting the cabinets white. Again. Only this time, I'd do some research and do a better job!

My husband, after giving me The Look, agreed to my plan. He almost always does (what a good guy!). After looking into it, I decided to buy a kit. Rust-oleum's Cabinet Transformations kit, to be precise.

It comes with a heavy-duty deglosser and scrubbers to really clean the cabinets. Then there's the paint itself ("Pure White"), a "decorative glaze" that you can apply for an antiqued effect (I didn't), and a scratch-resistant protective top coat. Rust-oleum had me at "protective top coat"-- I think that's where I had gone wrong in my previous cabinet painting endeavors! I was so excited when these babies showed up on my front porch (thanks, Amazon!).

Anyway, I picked the two hottest, most humid weeks of the year to paint the cabinets. In a house with no air conditioning, and I couldn't run a fan for fear of blowing dust particles onto my wet paint. I am a glutton for punishment, I tell ya! Stay tuned for the full report, and the "after" pics!