Kitchen cabinets: Episode 1

Well, after barely escaping with my sanity intact from my last little project, I (for some reason) decided to tackle a MASSIVE project: painting my kitchen cabinets white.  I've had the cabinets, or rather, the whole kitchen, on my mind for a long time - for at least a couple of years.  I replaced two of the three old appliances, which made a huge difference.  My remaining issues with it are:

1. It's a dark corner of the house
2. The cabinets have always looked a little cheap and DIY to me
3. The counters are ugly, not to mention crooked
4. I actually like the backsplash, but it no longer matches my color palette, and I'd like to extend it around all three sides of the kitchen

I looked into trying to deal with one or two of these things separately a while back, and came to the conclusion that you couldn't do one of them without doing all of them at once.  For example, I thought it would be easy to replace the backsplash, until I realized that the countertops were crooked.  Well, you can't lay a whole new backsplash out straight over a crooked countertop, so that was out.  And the more I looked at it, I realized that I think in order to straighten out the countertop, you might have to do some work on the bottom cabinets.  So in the meantime, I started an ING savings account where I've been putting $50 a month in order to save up for the big job.  I've got a little over $1,000 so far and next month, when I'm done paying off my car, I'll be able to make it $150 a month so the saving will go faster.  I'm thinking once I get up to $5-$6K I'll be able to at least start looking into doing the whole thing more seriously.

So for now, knowing that I think my ultimate solution is going to be to replace the cabinets entirely, I figured why not experiment with some color in there?  I've always thought white kitchens were attractive, and particularly in my house, where I don't have access to any direct natural light, I think it could really help lighten it up in there.  (I've got some other ideas about adding light, but more on that some other time)

So!  On to the project.  After winding down a lot of holiday and family festivities, I decided it was time to start work.  I lost a few days of work time this weekend when I got sick, but I managed to get a start on it tonight.  I did a lot of reading online and had a good chat with the guy at the paint store, so I felt like I had a good handle on what I needed to do.

Here's what I started with:

I decided that because I'm doing this on my own and it's going to take me a long time, it would be best to do it in chunks, instead of all at once.  Since I don't have a ton of space or extra countertops, I don't have a lot of places to store the pots and pans that live inside the cabinets while I'm painting them, so I thought this way I could rotate them in and out.  I'm also limited by my workspace, that is, the floor I have for laying out the cabinet doors while I'm painting them.  Here's what I've got to work with:

Yep, not much.  So I started with taking down the cabinet doors on the upper left portion and that seemed to fit about right.

Then I emptied everything out, put it on the kitchen table (or as much of it as I could fit anyway), and then started sanding everything.  After that I wiped it down with denatured alcohol to clean up the sawdust, and taped off the edges. 

I've decided that, since this is all essentially a temporary fix, I'm not going to worry about painting the insides of the cabinets.  I'll paint both side of the doors, and of course the frames, but I'm not going to worry about the shelves.  I've actually seen pictures where people have done this online and I think it can look nice, so we'll see how it turns out.  I suppose if it's terrible I can always go back and do the rest some other time.

Here's the doors in the midst of the same process. 

After taking off the hardware, I took the advice of the excellent Jackie Nelson and put all the hardware for each door in a separate baggie to keep track of it.

And here's the doors all cleaned up and ready to go.

Just doing this took me about 2 1/2 hours, so it was a good reality check for what an epic undertaking this will probably be.  Guess I'll be giving up all my upcoming weekend plans?  Hmmm.  Hopefully I'll be able to put in a few hours regularly all week long to keep going on this slowly but surely.  My goal is to get it done before my February trip to Barbados - wish me luck!