Columbus (A Few Weekends Back) and Painting Cabinets

First of all, thank you so much to everyone who has been praying for Derek's mom. She has had such a rough week and we just need to continue praying and trust that God has a purpose in it and that He doesn't make mistakes. It really means a lot to us and her. I will definitely keep you all updated.

Since all this craziness happened I never got the chance to blog about our weekend trip to see my parents. The weekend before Linda's surgery we went to Columbus. It was a pretty low key weekend. We didn't get in until Friday night, which made the weekend fly by too fast. But we did get to do some fun stuff like watch the Big Ten and SEC basketball tournaments, do a little shopping and go out to eat. We went to a restaurant called Tucci's which I had never been to but was absolutely delicious. Everything I tried was like heaven in mouth.

One other thing my mom and I did was test out Rustoleum's Cabinet Transformations product. I read about it first here. Derek and I really want to paint our kitchen cabinets and so do my parents. Our houses were built within a year of each other and they both have that late 80's early 90's oak that was so popular. This product basically takes out the sanding and priming phase of refinishing your cabinets and instead all you have to do is use their 3 (or 4) step method to cleaning, applying 2 base coats, applying a glaze (which is optional) and a top finishing/sealing coat. It looked pretty easy and based on the review I read, I thought it was worth a try.

My parents recently had their bathroom redone and they save some of the cabinet doors from it (which are the same as the kitchen cabinets) so we figured those would be perfect tests. We went to Home Depot to get the product. It took us close to 24 hours to refinish 2 cabinet doors, mostly due to the time you need to let everything dry in between coats. We definitely made a few mistakes and have some lessons learned, but I won't go into all that - you can e-mail me if you want to know more about it. As for the finished result, it wasn't bad. It was definitely better than they looked before. We used the color called linen and it was very white. A little whiter than we expected actually. We used the optional glaze on one of the cabinets and liked that look a little better.

Here are a couple of a before and afters from their website:

However, after trying this out I don't think it will be the route we go to redo our kitchen. There was definitely still the texture of the oak wood underneath the paint. The instructions did say you could prime the cabinets before adding the base coat and that probably would have helped a lot, however our painting skills weren't good enough to not make it look like we did it ourselves. I think if I'm going to go through the effort to redo our cabinets I don't want it to look like we did it ourselves - which will probably involve a lot more sanding, priming and renting a sprayer. I like the idea and I think if you didn't have grainy oak cabinets and were a very neat painter it would work. I just don't think I'm skilled enough. But, I'm glad we gave it a shot and it seems like a pretty cost and time effective solution if you either don't have grainy cabinets or can paint really well.

Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me to take any before and afters of the cabinets. Also - I wasn't paid or asked to review this product, I just wanted to try it out and see if it would work

So that was our fun little weekend in Columbus and adventure in cabinet painting. I still feel nervous about taking my own kitchen cabinets and painting them but I'm working on building up my courage :)