Crafty in Canada: Changing my kitchen (part 2) tutorial

Sunday 5 January 2014

Changing my kitchen (part 2) tutorial

I've never done a tutorial before so please bare with me as I stumble through this.

I've had so many questions about what I've been doing to my kitchen that I thought I better do this.

I had a lot of fun with this, and so did my husband. I deleted a lot of the pictures he took because well....my feet and legs were a fun thing for him to take pictures of. Silly men when handed a camera. :)

Lets start with our island

This is what it looked like before we started.

Pretty but dark.

You can read about it HERE

And this is what it looks like now

Our next step was doing the area around and above the stove.

And this is where the tutorial begins.

It's a wonderful area and I love it...but it didn't have the wow factor I wanted and all the details just blended in with everything else.

Add to that, everything seemed so dark.

And with the black appliances..well it needed to stand out.

So we started with TSP...the super degreaser.

This can be found in any home store..home depot, lowes, home hardware, canadian tire etc.

Just mix according to instructions then scrub your cabinets to within an inch of their life!

Hard work, but well worth the effort.

After doing that I gave everything a light sanding. If you are using a chalk paint, you don't have to do this, but I did anyway since this is a kitchen and gets lots of heavy use.

I removed everything that wasn't getting painted (drawers and doors that are beside it)

The sanding doesn't have to be harsh (don't kill yourself over this part)

After wiping all of it down again and vacuuming the corners that I couldn't get to with a cloth, I taped everything off.

The prep takes lots of time and elbow grease but it's super important in order to get a good result in the end.

Now the fun part starts. Laying down the paint :)

After two coats of self made chalk paint (the colour is called "Off white" ) and a couple of touch ups, I was ready to sand it down.

For me this is an important step. I love the smooth feel of cabinets and sanding it makes it feel like butter. :)

So now I handed the camera off to hubby, and let him in on the fun.

I mixed the brown I bought with glaze. Normally it's 4 parts glaze to 1 part paint, but I wanted lots of "open" time to this project so I think it was closer to 5-1 ratio.

I don't have the exact name of the brown. All I did was go to Home Depot, grabbed a pile of samples, went to the best light I could find and started eliminating the ones with a red undertone. Red makes everything look "dirty" or like mud. Something we wanted to avoid.

I filled a pail with water (warm since I hate having cold hands) dropped a rag in it to wipe away excess paint and then went nuts on the cabinets.

Notice I edited the pics...no more pics of me in my ugly work clothes..lol

Work in small areas so that the paint doesn't dry to quickly. The wet rag will help remove as much or as little as you want.

After laying down the paint, work quickly to remove the high areas. You don't want to much paint on that.

See how small the areas are that I work on?

Remember to wring out the cloth often. It picks up a lot of paint and gets saturated quickly.

Just keep working till you get the affect you want. Step back often to see where you may need more or less paint.

The top is done..now to work on the bottom portion.

I love the look :)

After I was done with the glazing, I let everything dry well and then finished it all off with a highly durable Polyurethane. Then did a final sanding with a 320 grit sand paper.