Painting your Kitchen Cabinets

Our kitchen was my least favorite room in our 30 year old house.  It had those 30 year old builder grade cabinets that are a yucky fake wood grain color.  During the 2020 Pandemic, I had some extra time on my hands and was researching ways we could fix up the kitchen.  From what I found, if you want new kitchen cabinets, the “cheap” option is going to IKEA, and they highly recommend paying for the installation from IKEA.  And that was still going to be thousands and thousands of dollars.  The kitchen was not a high enough priority on the list to spend that kind of money, so I looked at other options.  I saw a post from Shanty 2 Chic, and I decided I wanted to do that too! My husband and I agreed that even if we messed up, it couldn’t be much worse than what we already had!

So, first and foremost.  Here is our embarrassingly messy kitchen just before we started the project!

And you’ve seen the after-

I am SO SO happy with this kitchen makeover. We also added handles to the cabinet doors! All together this cost us less than $200!

I crazily thought I would do it myself in about a week.  My husband, the perfectionist, quickly took over and it took several months to be done.  That is fine with me though, because no one was coming over, and it would have taken us years to be ready to pay for new cabinets and countertops!

Here’s the article we worked off of. They have a video as well.

Here are the supplies we used. They are slightly different than the article, but the general concept was the same.

First, we cleaned all the surfaces we were going to paint with this Krud Kutter.

Then, we removed all the cabinets (and labeled them with their location), and put blue painters tape around edges we didn’t want painted.

Then, we painted them with Primer (even though they say it’s not necessary with Chalk Paint). with these brushes.

Then, we painted them with Chalk Paint a few times with these brushes. 

Then, we sealed it with 3 coats of Polycrylic with this brush.

We finished them off with these handles. 

We painted the cabinets outside on old tables and taped trash bags around them. I did purchase some painters pyramids, but they didn’t work well for me on this project. The chalk paint dries fairly quickly, so you could do multiple layers in the same day.

This is one of the biggest DIY home projects we have done, and I love how it turned out.