This part of life is called WORK

I honestly had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started this project. 

Painting your kitchen cabinets really doesn't sound THAT hard...

Looking back it makes me laugh, thinking about how naive I was.

However, with that said, I would honestly do it all again.

I fell in love with this kind of work and not that you can see it yet, but there is something so amazing, looking at something everyday, that you personally did with your own two hands. 

But that is more for the end blog.

This one is about the WORK.

Because it was nothing short of that.

That is what I did from the minute I woke up to the minute I crashed on the bed at night....

For weeks and weeks.

For about a month and a half, I swear I did not sit down... ever lol

Between working on the kitchen, Young Women stuff, my kids, and my husband, there was absolutely no free time.

Anyways, this project was WAY to big for me not to write about it, so here I go.

The first thing I did was take all the cabinet doors down and bring them to Jake's,

I had decided that if I was going to put all the work into painting them, it wasn't worth it, unless I did something to all the doors first, since they were plain as plain could be.

That was when I was inspired by a blog that I had found online titled, DIY shaker style doors. 

I figured, if I made all my doors into something first, painting them would be way more fun and worth while. And I thought since we still had at least one more trip to Phoenix before Jimmy graduated, that I should take all the doors down, get some wood, and take advantage of Jacob and his miter saw.

So while we were there, I cleaned all the doors with TSP, sanded all 20 doors... front and back... twice =), and then framed them all with 2.5 inch ripped strips of 1/4 inch birch plywood. 

The idea of having Jacob and his saw help me with framing the doors was a brilliant idea. With Jake's help, this part was actually, probably the easiest part of the whole project. If I didn't have his help, it would definitely had taken me WAY more time and given me A LOT of frustration. 

He would measure and cut the strips for me, and then I would nail them on with my new nail gun. It was super easy and surprisingly fast. 

It only took a couple hours to do all 20 doors and only 2 seconds for me to fall completely in love with my new nail gun hehe =)

I was completely terrible at taking pictures throughout this whole process. But here is one that showed the door without the frame and then one with the frame. 

After framing all the doors and after Jimmy's graduation, we took them all back home and I bid farewell to them for about 2 weeks. 

This is because I decided I should work on all the base boxes first. 

This part was also scary because the first thing I had to do was take EVERYTHING out of the cabinets and put it all in the guestroom. Man, it was a lot of stuff! And it made living not normal anymore. (Let's just say we had triple the pizza we usually have for about a month lol)

Anyways, one night Jimmy took the kids to Prescott, and I cleaned all the boxes, with TSP and then they were ready to be worked on.

So the next morning I took one of my hundred trips to home depot, came home, cleared off the kitchen with sheeting the best that I could, and put my 2nd new toy (my ryobi sander) to work. 

I can not even tell you how much dust a 220 grit creates. For days, I was covered head to toe in sand lol.

Notice the thin layer of sand on the ground.

Oh can I also point out? What a joy it was doing this project with two little ones =)

After hours of sanding, drydexing (I covered every inch in a thin layer of dry dex first, because I read how it can minimize the oak grain), and more sanding, the base boxes were finally ready to be primed and painted.

Here is a pic after some drydexing

And I think this is a picture after the first coat of primer was put on

And here is one after the second coat of primer.
OH! and check out that crown molding to the left. (if I could, I would put like 100 emojis here)

Installing that crown molding was probably the hardest and most frustrating day of the project for me. It was so hard to get that corner cut right and I went to home depot at least 6 times that day.

But I do feel, it makes the biggest difference so I am glad I spent the time figuring it out.

After some more sanding I finally started to paint. This part was actually frustrating too. I had  hardly no experience painting anything and here I was about to paint the thing most seen in our house lol and so because I was extremely nervous I would make lots of unnecessary mistakes. Mostly brushing over paint that wasn't completely wet anymore, so it would create alot of visible strokes.

But I am telling you, this ProClassic paint we got from Sherwin Williams is magical because EVERY time I was sure it was going to look terrible, it actually dried really nice.
So with the magic paint, 320 clear sand paper, and doing a couple coats, it didn't come out too terrible.

And then I was on to my drawers.
(Think this blog is long enough yet)

Almost all of our drawers were actually broken. Because they were super old and then pulled and tugged on by the kids (you would think some of them were used as pull up bars), they were all just falling apart.

However, one night while I was thinking about how I could fix them, I came up with the idea to use my new nail gun and WALA! It actually worked! I just went out and got some longer finish nails, and then nailed them all back together, and then covered up all the holes with putty.

I was excited =)

So then those were all washed, and then sanded, and then sanded again, and then primed, and then sanded, and then primed again, and then sanded, and then painted lol =)

And then onto my shelves and doors.

I wouldn't say this part was really hard, just VERY time consuming. I used dry dex around all the edges of each door first to get rid of the line between the door and the new frame, Then used putty to fill in all the holes the doors had, then sanded them all down again. AND then primed each and every one of them 3 times front and back! There were 4 doors that I actually primed 4 times.

Man, it took forever covering up that stupid grain!

 Because after priming each time, you then have to sand it, and then you have to vacuum up all the dust, before priming again. You also had to wait for it to completely dry each time before even doing all that. So with 20 doors, doing back sides first and then front sides, it was quite the process.

But finally I was ready to paint. I finally had come to a point where I realized they were honestly NEVER going to look perfect, so I moved on.

Painting took a while then too. I did two coats on the back sides first (and again, had to sand and vacuum in between coats) and then once they were dry enough, I flipped them all over to the front sides and did the same thing on fronts. And painting the front sides, was hard because you wanted to leave as little brush strokes as possible. 

If I ever do this again, I think I will spray the paint on the doors. But for now, I am happy with the way they are. 

And THEN after A LOT of frustration, those doors were finally put back on the base boxes. 

And I no joke, sat on a stool, and stared at those cabinets for almost 2 hours straight. 

I literally could not stop staring. 

It was just so different, and it was just DONE!

But there is more....

Again, this blog is TBC =)