Updating Kitchen Cabinets

I was excited about this kitchen when we moved in because it had white cabinets which I wanted. Until we realized that the white on the cabinets was actually some sort of vinyl coating. And it was cracking and peeling in some spots.

At first I was trying to figure out how to move the doors/drawers around so the peeling ones were less visible. And then spur of the moment at about 8 pm one night my husband and I thought, why not just peel the vinyl off? We did one really quickly without thinking about it and then there was no turning back. Thankfully they all came off pretty easily. 

The bases of the cabinets were painted so we only had to peel the doors/drawers. In about an hour we had finished all of them. 

Now there are a lot of tutorials on the internet about how to paint cabinets like this at Young House Love or this at East Coast Creative. So I am not going to do a full tutorial...especially because apparently I took no pictures???

So despite all the nice tutorials out there at this point in September 2011 A. I did not know what Pinterest was and B. I did not read blogs. Thankfully this is not that hard of a project. Basically we just went to Home Depot and told the guy at the paint counter that we wanted to paint wood cabinets. He told us to get oil based primer, small white foam rollers and semi-gloss paint. See, this is easy! 

I primed and Pascal sanded and painted because he is more of a perfectionist then me.

Part of the reason everything was covered up in the above picture is because for a hot second we were going to use a spray painter on the cabinets from my father-in-law. But we gave up on that quickly. For one thing it was an old spray painter that did not work as well as the new ones and second it was too early in our DIY career to take that on...Pascal did some of the base cabinets with the sprayer but then decided it was easier to use the small foam roller and that used less paint. 

I failed at taking pictures during the painting process. But it went pretty well especially since we had never done anything like this before. I use "we" liberally because I didn't actually do that much. The hardest step was definitely sanding after using the primer to insure that it was smooth with no brush strokes. I was even fired from this job because I give up too quickly on sanding.

Kitchen after pictures coming soon! The next steps were new light fixtures, appliances, back splash, and counters!