The St. Valentine’s Kitchen Rehab – Part 2

Having ignored the advice of the seemingly-knowledgeable man at Home Despot, who told us we couldn’t successfully sand our wood-veneer cabinet fronts, we were fortunate enough to have another expert on hand who was perfectly willing to go along with the plan. Our friend Rose, a professional carpenter visiting for the weekend, examined the test spot we’d sanded on one door and said it was entirely possible.

Ten years after I intended to remove the bulky cabinets that separated the kitchen from the dining area, Rose and I climbed atop the counter and wrestled them down. We’d purchased a new light fixture to install in the space the cabinets had occupied, but after encountering some complications in the existing wiring, we elected to delay that for another session. I have no doubt that Rose could have walked us through a means of cobbling together a solution, but I have this thing about electricity. I’ve seen it start fires that burned down perfectly nice houses, and I didn’t much want to burn down my own by getting creative with the wires. So the replacement lights would have to wait.

When we told Rose we were going to hit the cabinets with a belt sander, she shook her head and told us that a tool that powerful would quickly eat through the veneer and into the particle board below. We would have to use something a bit more controlled.

"Before" shot #1

"Before" shot #2 - dark and dreary

We picked up a handheld random orbital sander and some extra sandpaper for the Dremel multi-tool, which would prove itself extremely useful in sanding corners and other tough spots. Rose also suggested the mix of beeswax and orange oil that we rubbed into the stripped panels to offer a little protection and enhance the pinewood grain. The test areas we buffed looked great.

So. Much. Dust.

If you haven’t used a random orbital sander (and I hadn’t before this project) and if you are interested in a great upper-body workout that also gives you a nice looking kitchen at the end, then I have great news for you. After holding a random orbital sander at shoulder height for several hours, moving it evenly over a cabinet as the sander randomly tried to torque its weight out of my hands, my shoulders were screaming. The random orbital sander may be the best piece of gym equipment I own.

We worked with the windows open, despite the near-freezing temperatures, due to the astonishing amount of dust generated by the sanding. If you’re ever thinking about doing something like this, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to create barriers to the dust. It doesn’t just settle in the immediate area; it spreads out like a dirty bomb to coat every surface, horizontal and vertical, within reach of the earth’s atmosphere. Right now, people in the Azores are breathing nanoscopic tidbits of my kitchen. We relocated as much as we could from the kitchen and set up big tents of plastic tablecloths over the furniture in the other side of the common room.

New drawer pulls. Cabinets got simple handles.

It took a couple focused days of sanding, but we were very, very happy with the results. The kitchen went from a dark corner to an airy space that finally felt like part of the common room. We made a couple additional changes that we felt improved the outcome considerably. First, we replaced the existing drawer pulls, which were white porcelain, with inexpensive new ones. Throughout the project, we’d discussed our concern that exposing the light colored pinewood of the cabinets was going to push the resulting decor toward a look we termed “Kountry Kitchen.” While we liked the appearance of the pine, it didn’t work with the old porcelain knobs. The new hardware preserved the rustic look without getting too kitschy.

Second, we took the door off an under-counter cabinet at the end of the island and converted it to a bookcase. We did this as an afterthought, when we realized that we’d given away enough of the old pots and pans that had been stuffed into every cranny of the old kitchen to spare the store room. It made a huge difference and really dressed up the look of the island, while providing a convenient spot for cookbooks.

"After" including the re-purposed bookshelf. Painters tape still covers the edges as we debate colors. Pendant lights will go in the window over the island.

We haven’t yet totaled the receipts from our daily trips to Home Despot, but we estimate that the project costs (sander, paint, wax, hardware, lighting, and other incidentals) will add up to a few hundred dollars.

So much lighter - compare to the "before" shot from the same angle above.

The key factor that made the project work? Having a friend there who was experienced enough to give us good advice. I’m sure we would have muddled through somehow, but Rose saved us much time and heartache with her guidance. As much as I like the idea of the brave amateur who casts aside any fear of failure in his/her DIYings, sometimes it really, really helps to have someone there who knows more than you do. Without our friend and expert, we would have 1) belt sanded the crap out of the cabinet fronts, stripping the veneer, then been obliged to 2) paint them. The result would have been fine, but not as good. As for the new lighting, I wouldn’t even have a plan for that yet.

Knowledge and experience are profound gifts when shared between people. Having someone willing to provide guidance on a project can make the difference between trying it out yourself and failing to attempt it (or having to pay someone to do it for you). If you know how to do something, one of the most pro-social things you can do for another person is help them acquire the same understanding and experience. Sometimes, our economic system forces us to hoard knowledge and demand that others pay us for it. I’d like to imagine that by sharing our experience, we empower each other to reach greater self-reliance and stability.

The St. Valentine’s Kitchen Rehab – Part 1

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.