Kitchen Makeover
I’ve been painting lots of things besides canvases lately! My husband and I recently purchased our first house, and with it has come many projects. In this post, I’ll show you how we painted over our MDF kitchen cabinets to give the kitchen a much needed pop of color!
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MDF stands for medium-density fiberboard. This is what our cabinet doors and drawer faces are made out of. Basically, instead of using a solid piece of wood straight from the tree (that’s how cabinets are made, right?), the wood is broken down into fibers and then put back together with binders and wax and things to create MDF boards. Without anything on them, the MDF boards are just a solid tan color with no wood grain. In our case, as with a lot of MDF cabinets, the doors were covered with plasticy vinyl stuff (I’m pretty sure that’s the technical term). However, the vinyl covering had started to peel, which didn’t look very good. This led to planning an entire kitchen makeover that may or may not take years to complete. But it’s all designed in my head, and the finished product looks great!
Step 1: remove annoying vinyl stuff
While my husband removed the hardware from the cabinet doors, I worked on peeling off the vinyl layer. It was as satisfying as it sounds. Some of it came off in entire pieces, like it was barely stuck to the doors at all. Unfortunately though, most of the vinyl didn’t come off as easily.
Step 2: remove the rest of annoying vinyl stuff
After we removed the doors from the cabinets, we used a heat gun to get the rest of the vinyl off. This was a lot easier. The heat gun made the vinyl just pop right off! We then laid out all of the doors on plastic (to protect to floors). This took up most of our dining room, foyer, and living room.
Step 3: prime and paint!
We sanded the doors and then applied two coats of Zinsser primer. This gave the doors a good seal and prevented the paint from being absorbed into the MDF. The smell was terrible, but it worked great! We found that 6” rollers worked best for giving it an even coat and filling in the groove on the front.
Step 4: Paint cabinet boxes
This might have been the scariest part. We planned to paint the cabinet lowers the same color as our dining room (Salty Dog by Sherwin Williams). It’s a dark navy blue color, and it was a little intimidating putting such a dark color on our cabinets. We looked at every available color swatch and chose this one. I spent so long on Pinterest looking at different cabinet colors, and decided this was the color to go with. Then we started painting. The first coat was so much brighter than the color swatch! I was freaking out a little bit. It did darken to the color it was supposed to be, but it took three or four coats.
See? Much better.
For the uppers (and the inside of all the cabinets) we used Pure White by Sherwin Williams. Even though the cabinets were white before, they looked a little dirty, and a fresh coat of paint helped a TON. We had to paint the top cabinet doors while they were still on the hinges, because we couldn’t take them off due to the hinge placement. They have glass in the doors, so after painting them we had to scrape the paint off the glass.
Step 5: spray paint door knobs
The existing hardware was black, and they would not have shown up very well on our now navy cabinet doors. After consulting Pinterest again, we decided to spray paint all of the door knobs and drawer pulls gold. The gold really pops against the navy! The spray paint we used has a “hammered” texture. I didn’t want the door knobs to be super shiny, so this worked really well.
After re-hanging the doors, we made some adjustments to make sure they were level, and added magnets (some of them had Velcro keeping them closed). Then, my husband installed tip outs under the sink and a recycling bin pull out in one of the cabinets. And that’s it! It took a couple weekends to complete, but it was definitely worth the effort. Below are the “after” pictures. I’m so happy with my cabinets! Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!
