Winter Project - Kitchen Facelift

This winter I just needed a change.  Something kinda dramatic and fun, but not "death-defying" fun. I generally keep busy on garden projects, but it's winter now and I didn't want to wait for spring to do something I could stand back and look at.

Hmmmm, what could I do to the house that wouldn't put us in dept or the hospital...the kitchen and bathroom both could use a little 'sprucing up'.

Besides, I hated that kitchen and we had completely ignored the house for the past few years. Anything I did in there will be a vast improvement.

Original Kitchen

When we bought the house the kitchen had (and still have) cheap white melamine cabinets, a grey counter top and white sink. The walls were originally a depressing grey, which we've long since painted over and wall papered.  The flooring was swapped out for a warmer vinyl and things were better, but the kitchen itself is still...cheap and plastic looking.

We've decided it's time to make do an actual remodel to the kitchen, but we want to make sure about our choices before we started knocking out walls. We 'test drive' our ideas first - I set a table where the new island would go (made us use the new traffic pattern) and have a few color ideas we're not completely sure about.

New Stove and sink

The wall won't come out until we're ready to fully commit to that project, but color is fairly harmless, so we're starting there.

First - Change the color of the counter tops.  Ok, so we actually bought a new stove on a killer sale first and then found our copper sink on clearance, but that is beside the point. 

Because of the beautiful black stove and copper sink, I thought black counters would look very nice, but who wants to go buy a new counter top just to check out the color? 

Roll on counter coating curing for 24 hrs

Enter Daich Coatings, out of Canada http://www.daichcoatings.com. These guys have great 'roll on counter resurfacing' products at half the price of the Rustoleum version.  So we bought a kit online and started on the counters.

The kit showed up, we watched the videos and realized that this change is not hard to do.  We sanded down our counters and started the process - primer, wait, primer again, wait, black sticky stuff, wait, black sticky stuff again, wait, sand, wait, seal, wait, seal again.

Ta-dah!! Black granite-like counters.

But it wasn't as smooth and shiny as we decided we wanted. Hmmm, time to look into the epoxy resin stuff that makes your counters look like stone or glass on top.  We really weren't too worried about the counters, since all of that will come out on the remodel. Anything I do to them can be chalked up to a 'learning experience'.

Light Cabinet Test

While we were debating on the resin idea and letting the counter sealer cure, we played with paint colors for the cabinets. We liked the rich deep mahogany as well as the lighter brown color. Keep in mind that we're not painting 'real' wood, but plastic melamine, so paint is just fine.

Dark Cabinet Test

Since we couldn't decide, we painted one cabinet the deep reddish color we liked and another set the lighter shade that looked good with the counter top.  We couldn't decide.

I added a stain to give the drawers a faux wood grain look.  We couldn't decide.

We turned the lights off at night in the kitchen and area with the mahogany colored cabinet turned into an inky, dark, scary place. We went with the lighter color cabinets and I started painting.

Finished Cabinet

The faux wood grain staining process is a little tricky and I need to redo a couple of the cabinets, now that I've got the hang of it.  It took a little finessing to figure out the order of the stains, but things are starting to look more like wood and less like plastic.

We don't plan to keep the cabinets, just  use this activity to decide what kind of wood type to start looking for.


Yes, our cabinets are glowing - cool, huh?  While painting cabinets, we decided we'd get some under-cabinet lighting, so all of us could see in the dark in the new kitchen. After some online research, we rounded up some tiny LED tape lights (thank you ebay) and stuck them up in the toe area of the cabinets and above the counters.  Boy are those things handy - they fit anywhere and you wire them together where you need them.

Cabinets wrapped up to protect during epoxy coat

After several days with the counters, we decided to try our hands at epoxy resin coats to see if we can get the counter tops to look more glossy.
We did a test on a smaller counter top, got good results and then moved onto the long counter.

Our first layer went pretty well, but had some spots that didn't cover right, so we did a second coat last night.  We've pulled out the sink - again - and made a tape dam around the openings.  This approach worked really well and we didn't get goo in our sink area.


Today the surface is curing and we will set the sink back tomorrow evening.  After that we wait one more day and then our counter tops are completely finished.

Next task - paint the upper cabinets.