Painted Kitchen Cupboards

The kitchen was based off the Leckford collection from John Lewis.  I liked the idea of leaving the kickboards/plinths and molding oak, painting the doors and having oak handles.   (Well, truthfully, I don't love oak.  But it was what we had and seemed to work well enough.)

The kitchen was one of the main reasons we bought the space.  It was larger than most of the kitchens we'd seen in other houses our price range.  It was light and had tall ceilings.  And a favorite of Niall's was the range cooker with the eight hob stove.  (And yes, there are days when we use all of the burners!)

The kitchen wasn't horrible, but we thought it might be nice to change a few things.

The easiest thing was to change the hardware.

I took off all the old hardware and sold it on ebay.  And used the money to buy new knobs.

After some deliberation we decided to paint the doors and drawer fronts.  I took them all off.

The cabinets are melamine.  I washed them with sugar soap, sanded, wiped them down again and then used a roller to put on three coats of International Paint Melamine Primer, on each side.  I let each coat dry for a day.   Then we put on three (sometimes four) coats of International Paint Furniture and Cupboard Paint in Antique Cream.   We took a long time painting the cupboards and letting them cure before installing them.

Then reinstalled the doors and added the knobs.

We had the cabinet doors at the rental house.  When we moved everything to the new house, somehow to drawer fronts went missing-permanently.  It took me months of emailing, phoning and looking in dumpsters until I found a suitable replacement to paint.  During the wait the kitchen sink looked like this.

Eventually I got the drawer fronts put in, just as the baby figured out how to open the cupboards.  (Hence the rubber band.)

We're still missing a dishwasher and a dryer, but the kitchen is coming along.