Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Painting Bathroom Cabinets (what not to do edition)

I'll start off by saying that I didn't do this project correctly. Close, maybe, but not quite. Actually the result turned out really nice, but I definitely did not do all the steps to this process, and I will do it correctly next time. Young House Love has a great blog post about how to correctly paint cabinets: http://www.younghouselove.com/2008/11/how-to-paint-your-kitchen-cabinets/.

Let's go to what I did. First of all, these are the before pictures of what I painted. As is clear, the paint wasn't looking so hot. I also wanted to bring in a richer look into the space and was not a huge fan of the white countertop, white cabinets look. We chose Behr's Bison Brown for the color. There are two reasons why I love this color. One: we loved the rich tones that it brought in without being too gray or reddish. Two: the bison is the mascot of our alma matter Bucknell, which makes it simply awesome.



First, I took off all the hardware and wiped down the cabinets.



What I should have done next is primed the cabinets so that the paint would stick better (I didn't). I maybe should have even sanded (I gave up after one cabinet piece). 

Instead, the paint took some coats in order to really stick to the cabinets. See below after one coat. 

Regardless, after a few coats of paint, I got to the result I was looking for. It took a little longer for the cabinets to be un-tacky enough to screw in the hardware. I took a few pictures trying to capture the right coloring of the cabinets. The ones with flash tended to introduce a reddish tone not actually in the cabinets. 

Before hardware: 

After hardware:


We both love the new look. I plan on doing the other one in the master bedroom as well. I think I shall attempt to do the next one the "right" way. I think that the way I did it will hold up fine (paint seems to be sticking well). But I would like to try doing it correctly, just to compare. 

In other news, our flowers are blooming! The rain and milder weather has been great. Check it out: 





My mom planted the lilies. So excited they are blooming! 

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