A Do It Yourself Guide to Refinishing Kitchen Cabinets

One day, you might find yourself looking at your kitchen cabinets and going, “Agh, what dirt, stains, fading and peeling. This looks deplorable! I ought to get a whole new kitchen cabinet set in time for Thanksgiving.” It surely would not help if Thanksgiving is a week away, with a dozen of your relatives showing up and seeing your kitchen. Whether or not you are trying to impress your aunts or in-laws, it would be great if you would be able to fix things up pretty quickly. One option that you should explore is refinishing kitchen cabinets.

Doing a cabinet refinishing job is an option for you if the cabinets look bad only on the surface, and are not completely messed up or otherwise broken. You can save yourself hundreds, if not thousands of dollars by having them refinished, and you can save more money, while enjoying a day or two of manual labor, by doing the job yourself.

You are going to have to clear your schedule for this. While it is possible to get everything done in a day, it is best to give yourself a few days. This will also allow sufficient time for the drying of your newly refinished cabinets.

It is assumed that you have the tools needed to dismantle your kitchen cabinet set in an orderly manner. Because no kitchen cabinet doors are exactly alike, it is best to take note of which doors belong to which part of the kitchen, so that you do not have a problem later on of the doors not fitting quite right.

Once you have the cabinets apart, go out to your yard or an open space where you can work without any distractions and where you can put the cabinet doors down in a convenient manner. You will need some cleaning apparatus, as well as paints, varnish and the like. If you do not have some of the required supplies, they are usually readily available in any hardware store.

If you are changing the color of your cabinets, you will need to use a thinner to remove the old paint. When this is done sufficiently, you can now smooth out any rough parts using sandpaper or some other device.

The next thing to do is go about cleaning the kitchen cabinets. Make sure the dust particles are removed so that they do not get stuck on the cabinet later on.

When painting, do it evenly, and in a uniform pattern with consistent strokes. After allowing sufficient time, you will be ready to varnish the cabinets. Do this evenly as well. As a precaution, do not expose yourself for too long in the fumes. Move a little distance when you can, just to catch your breath and have some fresh air.

Once again, you will need to allow for sufficient time for drying before replacing the cabinets in the kitchen. Make sure that you put signs so that no one touches your handiwork before it is ready.

And that is pretty much what you need to know about refinishing kitchen cabinets. You will manage to save yourself a lot of grief by doing it yourself the right way.