I was living in a small, unassuming house in West Virginia when I met my wife. People tend to refer to the place as “the cabin,” a bit of mischaracterization that lends itself to images of log walls or a unabomber shack. Instead, it’s a mostly open-plan home that looks every bit like it was built in 1976, and hasn’t had any meaningful revision since then.
I learned a valuable lesson about home repair when I bought the house from friends over ten years ago. The kitchen, despite its placement in the corner of a bright common room with large windows, was eerily dark, hemmed in by a set of hanging cabinets that blocked out the sunlight and made the space feel dingy and isolated. The cabinets had doors facing both inside and outside the kitchen, so I immediately removed them to connect the kitchen with the rest of the space and allow some light to enter. My ultimate intention was to take down the row of cabinets completely, replacing the florescent lights above with pendants that would hang over the prep area of the kitchen island.
Then, ten years passed.
The kitchen as I begin a long-overdue demolition of the cabinets
Yes, over a decade after I removed the doors, the cabinets were still hanging up, and the same flickering lights were still in place overhead. Lacking confidence in my ability to make a more meaningful repair without screwing something up, I’d grown accustomed to looking at the doorless cabinets and lost all my will to fix them.
From this, I learned that home improvements have a kind of momentum: fixing something leads to other ideas, and builds the confidence to try new things. It’s crucial to maintain at least a little forward progress, or there is an ever-present danger of stagnation. So, when we decided to rehab the kitchen, the cabinets were first on the list.
The kitchen wasn’t in need of a major overhaul; the appliances still work, the counters are intact, and the tile floor looks OK. Bit it was still a dark and unpleasant place to cook, mostly due to the espresso-brown stain that had been applied to the wooden cabinets, probably in 1976. In fact, if there was a decorating theme to the place when I bought it, it would have been “shades of dark brown.” I’d painted over several milk-chocolate colored walls and the one dark-chocolate bathroom (I can’t imagine that even in 1976 this was a fashionable choice for bathroom color), and the cabinets were the last vestige of the old aesthetic.
We wanted a lighter colored wood that would make the kitchen feel more open and airy, but we didn’t want to tear out all the existing cabinetry, because 1) we are cheap, and 2) we wanted to see what we could do ourselves, and 3) we wanted to minimize waste and not throw away objects that still had a useful life.
To evaluate whether to strip or sand the wood, took a door from the cabinets over to Home Despot. A terribly nice older man, who no doubt recognized a pair of naive, blundering home-repair wannabes at fifty paces, politely told us that the cabinets were clad in a thin wood veneer over particle board, and would survive neither stripping nor sanding. It appeared our only option was to paint over it all.
We’d considered this possibility, so with a little resignation we bought a bucket of primer and went home with our customary million different paint samples.
But back home, we began ruminating over what a shame it was to lose the wood grain. As an experiment, we took one cabinet door and hit it with the dremel and a small sanding attachment. To our surprise, we didn’t immediately burn through the veneer. With some effort, the stained outer layer of wood faded to reveal a pretty, simple knotty pine wood beneath it. A light buffing of oil and wax brought out the grain and deepened the color a little. The result was a rustic but attractive surface – not necessarily the right fit for an ultra-modern kitchen, but just the thing for “the cabin.”
All it would take was some free time and a lot of work. We’d intended to take a vacation during the week before Valentine’s Day, maybe someplace we could sit on some warm sand. Instead, we’d settle for a warm sander.
To be continued.
