How to make your old wooden kitchen cabinets look new again

Your kitchen should be a place of joy and comfort as it is the heart of the home. Many people do not have a lot of money to invest in a new kitchen right now due to the economy we are in. I have a house that was built in 1964 with flat panel cabinet doors and hinges that went across the middle of the door.

Converting this kitchen was much cheaper and much easier than I thought it would be. The first thing I did was think about what I wanted to achieve in this kitchen, I wanted a bright space that my family would enjoy. I didn’t want to install a new kitchen because I didn’t want to spend the money on my dream kitchen.

I took out all the cabinet doors and removed the soffits from the upper cabinets in the kitchen, removing the soffits and big black hinges made a world of difference to the room renovation. I took a palm sander and sanded the front of the doors and the back of the doors, I also sanded the inside of the cabinets and then used mineral spirits to clean the cabinets. The next part of the process was to install crown molding along the top of the upper cabinets, then I took a bead board and applied it to the sides of the kitchen cabinets and added other skinny molding on the cabinets where there was imperfections.

My next goal was to modernize these doors in some way, I took a small frame molding and measured about two inches from the edge of the entire wall around the door. I measured the space inside the frame and cut a piece of bead board to fit inside that space, it gave the door a very different look.

I also removed the old countertop which was an ugly dark green and there was a peninsula sticking out of the middle of the floor. I removed part of the peninsula and created an island out of it, adding furniture legs, bead top, and painting it chocolate brown to offset the lighter color of the cabinets.

I sprayed the Benjamin Moore cabinets and doors simply white, using his impervo paint. It’s a white but not a boring bright white, very pretty when it all comes together. I gave the cabinets a coat of primer and a finish coat, impervo paint is self leveling so minor blemishes are gone.

I added chrome hardware to the doors and hinges, the hinges are now hidden, not halfway up the door like the old hinges. I bought a new Formica countertop that looks like granite, not the standard Formica you’d see at Home Depot, but an upgraded version.

After painting the cabinets and installing the new counter, I purchased new stainless steel appliances and installed hardwood floors in the kitchen. The end result is absolutely beautiful, I took this very boring kitchen that nobody wanted to spend time in and turned it into the best room in the house.

I had to do a lot of research for some of the projects, but the cost was minimal compared to having a contractor do the work.