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My kitchen was looking rather boring and it needed help. There are a lot of things that could be done, but I felt a kitchen cabinet makeover would make the most impact. They are very basic plain cabinets, and as I said, they’re boring. I decided to see if I could spruce them up a bit.
Here are some before photos.
If you look closely you’ll see the cabinets were hung quite high on the wall. The standard height above the counter is about 18″ so the first order of business was to rehang the them.
I removed all the cabinet doors and scrubbed everything with TSP. It would have been smart to do at least some of the prep work and painting while the cabinets were off the wall, but that never occurred to me.
I applied this beautiful paintable and prepasted beadboard wallpaper from Graham & Brown to the front of the cabinet doors. It is very easy to work with and the results are tremendous, no one can tell it isn’t real beadboard.
I used this rope trim to cover the edges of the wallpaper. It was a little difficult to cut and keep intact, but nothing too bad. I used a fine-toothed trim saw blade to cut them. I adhered them to the cabinets with Elmer’s Wood Glue.
Then we added crown molding to the top of the cabinets and a cove molding to the bottom. I just love the look of crown and base molding, they really finish a piece beautifully.
Then I removed the hardware and primed everything. And then painted.
I decided to spray paint the hardware, not knowing how well that would work. I chose black. It was worth a try and if it didn’t hold up then I could do something else.
These cabinets have no knobs, so I added some. I used this nifty little tool that makes marking the very simple and assures they will all be the same.
Stay tuned for part two of my kitchen cabinet makeover, where I will write about doing the lower cabinets and then have a big reveal.
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