Kitchen Renovation | Cabinets + Drawers

Let’s chat cabinets. New cabinets would have been amazing, but the price tag was just not doable for us at the time. We also knew that building our own cabinets was a little too out of our DIY capabilities. Our plan was to keep the original cabinets, refinish the doors and get all new hinges and hardware. Sounds simple right? Well, this process is a perfect example of how not every detail happens as planned, and you sometimes have just got to go with the flow.

Lead Test

***super important*** We live in a 1950’s ranch. The cabinets and walls had many layers of paint and wallpaper. Since the house more than likely had original paint somewhere underneath all those layers, we did a lead test to be sure we didn’t need to hire out someone special to remove the lead paint. We got a real easy lead test kit like this one from Lowes to test for lead and all things tested negative for lead. Yay! We could continue on with our project ourselves and have the ease of knowing we weren’t dealing with anything toxic. Don’t worry, we still used masks and respirators because sanding paint is nasty.

Cabinets

First, we numbered all the cabinet doors so that we knew what order to put them back up in when ready. We planned to sand them down and paint them and update the hinges and hardware. Hinges. Who knew there were so many hinges to choose from and that they would create our biggest dilemma of the whole project? Not us. We had no idea. I’ll elaborate more in a bit.

Second, we started with small little sanded down part of the cabinet to just see what the wood looked like underneath the MANY layers of paint. It was beautiful and I almost wanted to leave it natural and just seal it, but alas, we went ahead with the paint. We sanded the outside and insides of the cabinets. The insides were the hardest to sand, but we had to do this because there was old paint and wallpaper glue inside the cabinets. We couldn’t get all new cabinets but we wanted them to be as fresh and close to new as we could get them. I’m not going to lie, sanding the inside of the cabinets took a long time. I’ve blocked it out of my mind.

Hinges & Cabinet Doors

Door hinges. You’d think we would be experts by now, but the hinge fiasco has made me never want to shop for hinges ever again. Apparently, there are 5,934,5903 different versions of hinges for every type of cabinet door possible. The options are endless and there wasn’t one that worked with what we wanted. Ok, there was one we found but they were $30 each and we needed 18 hinges total. We were not wanting to spend over $500 on just new hinges. Here are the hinges we needed:

They are a Rockler Hinge and Plate for 3/8” Lipped Face Frame Door and here is why we needed this specific hinge…the dang cabinet doors that are from the 1950’s (which are cool, but not practical). The doors have an inset on the inside of the door that create somewhat of a frame and it closes perfectly into the cabinet when shut like a perfect little pocket. I was totally on board with ditching the perfect little pocket close because they always got stuck anyway and I wanted to save a few $100.

So, we’re pretty lucky we live next door to a super generous contractor who renovates houses for a living and is really great at what he does. I’m sure he thinks we’re nuts. His team had some downtime and he offered to help by making us some new cabinet doors out of MDF that did not have the inset and would require a cheaper hinge. We signed up for that and got new cabinet doors. We also went ahead and had him make matching drawer fronts so we could have a cohesive look.

Soffett

When you see before photos, you’ll notice the space above the cabinets is painted drywall. We have low ceilings and the closed space above the sink really made the space above the sink feel dark and closed off… because it was dark and closed off! We don’t have a ton of storage in this kitchen, so any unused space we could tap into was something we felt we had to do. We decided to rip out the space above the cabinets to add lighting and use it for decorative storage.

Painting + Hardware

After we decided on the hinges and after we figured out we would go the new cabinet door route, we finished sanding and priming the cabinets inside and outside, and then finally painted. We love a clean white and bright kitchen especially since our kitchen isn’t huge, but we also didn’t want all white cabinets. We opted for white upper cabinets, white walls, and then went with a darker lower cabinet. We got our paint locally at Spectrum Paint in OKC but you can find these colors at your area home improvement store too. The upper cabinets are Benjamin Moore Snowbound and the lower cabinets are Benjamin Moore Southwest Peppercorn. These colors are mainly found with the Sherwin Williams brand, but our paint store was able to match these colors with the Benjamin Moore brand they carried. It never hurts to ask for a match!

We decided to glam up the space with some simple gold hardware from a local store. Unfortunately that store is no longer open, but the gold modern hardware is a little easier find now than it was in 2015.