Wednesday, January 25, 2017

How to Dress up Your Boring Cabinets






































We didn't have the budget for new cabinets when we bought our house but I actually didn't mind them at all. Besides being very dirty and greasy, I really loved the look of the beadboard. Before we ever even moved in, we'd taken off all 32 of the cabinet doors, removed all of the hardware, and started prepping for paint. A few of them even needed to be repaired but that's nothing that is ol gal couldn't handle. I'm a master of wood glue and clamps :) Especially if it saves thousands of dollars...


Although, the cabinets weren't bad, I really hated the soffit above them. We talked about busting it out and opening that space up, but honestly, I didn't want the mess. If you can't tell my by DIY coffered style ceiling post, we avoid mess at all cost. If you were a fly on the wall during our projects, you'd catch my husband and I standing around a whole lot, scratching our heads, asking "What can we do with this?...How can we make this work?" That is sometimes followed by hours of collaboration and bouncing ideas back and forth, measuring, YouTube video, ect. Less demo= less problems, y'all. So, instead of demo'ing, we wanted to make the cabinets and the soffit look like one unit.


This is what the kitchen looked like before we moved in:

Here's a list of the changes we made to our cabinets to get this result:
(we did these projects randomly over the course of 2 years, so I'm going to list them in an order that would be best if you did them all at once)

1. Crown Moulding 
We added thick crown moulding to dress up the soffit and also to add some ''wow'' factor. We painted the soffit and moulding the same color as the cabinets to make it all appear to be one unit.

2.Corbels
The corbels are one of my favorite touches in the kitchen.
From Lowe's, we purchased 6 of these spindles and 6 of these corbels then attached them to the ends of our upper cabinets. My husband secured them by drilling through the bottom shelf and into the top of the corbel. Corbels are a perfect way to customize your basic builder's grade cabinets. I really feel like they add so much character to our space.

Here's a ''during'' picture:

3. Paint
Our cabinets, soffit, moulding/trim, and corbles are all painted in an epoxy by Sherwin Williams. We had them color match Behr's ''Cozy Cottage'' in eggshell. Cozy Cottage has been my go to cream color for years. I've literally painted 100s of things with it. I was really worried about the durability of painted cabinets in a room that gets so much traffic. So, before painting, we primed with Kilz and used one of the highest quality paints that Sherwin Williams offers. We're about to go into year 3 with painted cabinets and they are still going strong.

4. New hardware and hinges
We swapped out the old 80's hardware for fresh new oil rubbed bronze knobs and hinges from Lowes. I do still have cup pulls for the drawers but I have not gotten around to putting them on.


Unfortunately, I've lost track of how much our cabinet update has cost, to date. Although, I can tell you it was less than $700 based on an estimated cost of primer, paint, pulls, knobs, hinges, moulding, spindles, and corbles.



 What do you think? Not bad for completely custom cabinets, huh? 




1 comment:

  1. The cabinets should be put together before they are hung. This requires some level of skills to make sure that they have been assembled in a secure and safe manner.
    Bend OR

    ReplyDelete