I'm already in love with it. It just pops so awesomely against the green! Oh, and don't mind the missing door - I'll explain.
So, last week, after sanding and rubbing down that section of the cabinets, as well as the doors (both sides) with rubbing alcohol, I was ready to start painting. I created kind of a spectacular mess.
After one coat of primer, it took three coats of paint to get the kind of coverage I wanted. Each round of painting took a couple hours, with at least 2 hours of drying time in between each, with an overnight period after the final coat on each side of the doors to make sure they cured before I re-attached the hardware and re-hung them. So all in all, this section of 5 doors took about 12-13 hours over the course of a week (not counting time spent waiting for them to dry). Oof.
Once everything was painted and dry, I then had the task of replacing everything in the cabinets. This was actually great, since it gave me a chance to clean and purge some stuff that I don't really use. I ended up being able to re-organize and make better use of the space - cleaning for the win!
Now here's where the missing door comes in. In response to my last post, BOTH of my parents (apparently independently of one another) suggested that I might consider leaving some of the doors off to create some open shelving. This was an idea I have actually thought a little bit about myself, so I decided that I would leave one or two of the doors off as I re-assembled things to see what it would look like.
My thinking is that there are a couple of practical reasons in choosing which shelves to leave open: either you have some pretty dishes to display, or you want easy access to dishes you use all the time. That ruled out some of the higher-up cabinets for me. I also ruled out the cabinets where there's a dividing panel down the middle instead of one whole open cabinet. You can see what I mean in the photo above - that cabinet over the microwave is an example of one like that. It just looks kind of messy if you could see stuff stacked behind that panel. So that narrows it down in my mind to the two corner cabinets. They're symmetrical, they're easy to reach, and are big enough to fit some of my more attractive stuff. Not sure what I want to do yet, so I think I'll just leave it open like this for a while until I finish up the rest of the painting and then see how I'm feeling.
The other thing I'm waiting to make a decision on is the hardware that I'm going to put on these newly-painted beauties. You can see that I left it off for the time being.
These were the old ones. They're still plenty lovely, but now that I've fallen in love with my oil-rubbed bronze hardware everywhere else in the house, I think it would make sense to do it here in the kitchen too. I'm heading to the store tomorrow to see if I can find any good options and will definitely keep you posted!
So now that I've got these done, I'm moving on to my next batch, the section over the microwave and the right hand corner.
Eesh. Lots of work to do here. But it's already come a long way!
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