~painted cabinets tutorial & a winner~

One thing I forgot to mention about the floors yesterday was to be sure and wear knee pads.

My knees started hurting about 1/4 way through the process.

I have a high tolerance for pain and was too stubborn to stop, so I ignored it.

At the end of the night when I stepped out of my grubby work clothes, my knee caps were raw and bleeding. The skin had totally rubbed off.

So there you go, save your knees and wear pads!

Now, onto the cabinets!

I used a color by Ralph Lauren called Oatmeal.

I had it color matched to Behr paint, the new kind with the primer built in.

Very worth it.

I did a satin finish.

I removed all the doors and hardware and sanded them with my palm sander outside.

This picture is out of order, but this is the glaze I used.

More on that later on down this post.

I set up a workroom on my dining room table.
I painted 2 coats of the paint onto the doors with one of those throw away foam brushes that cost about 52 cents.
I was not very particular about the painting. I just made sure it had an even coat and no globs anywhere.
Let dry between coats, about an hour.
2 coats was all that was needed, love this paint!

This is our corner unit that I didn't take off because I couldn't get to the hinges.
This is the door I will be giving you the glaze technique on.
Here you can see it is painted, and that's it.
I didn't sand them anymore at this point.

I used another cheap foam brush to apply the glaze
{pictured above}
that I got at a craft store.
You want to put it in all the "cracks" and "crevices" that your doors have.
As you can see, you can be very sloppy with this step.
I would recommend doing 1 section at a time, just to ensure the glaze doesn't dry to much on you for the next step.

Next, take a rag that is damp, not wet, damp.
Have another dry one on hand as well.
Simply use the rag to "take off" some of the glaze, making sure you leave it in the crevices.
Does that make sense?
Seriously, not good at tutorials....

If the rag is too wet you will take off too much.
If it is too dry you will just smear it all around and it will look like you let a 2 year old do it.
Use a combination of the damp rag and the dry rag until you get the look you are going for.
Don't make it too "perfect"
You want some areas to have the glaze more heavily than other areas.
This is what gives it character.
This process takes less than 5 minutes per door.
Have several rags handy. You don't want to use the same one over and over, as you will just deposit glaze from used parts of the rag onto parts of the doors you don't want glaze.

And here is the finished door, voila!
I used the leftover Varathane from the floor to seal the cabinets.
For those of you that asked, it's a product made by Varathane and the can says,

no odor floor finish, polyurethane. High traffic formula, fastest drying water based, crystal clear, satin. It was spendy but I only went through 1 gallon on both the floor and cabinets. Someone else asked about my cabinet hardware.

I think I got it at Home Depot, but it was such a long time ago, I don't remember!

It might have been Target.

Wherever it was, I need to remember because I lost one of mine in this whole process!
Another question someone asked about the floors was if I needed to tape off the trim work/baseboards.

The answer is no.

It was very easy to do both the sanding and staining without getting any on these areas.

I hope I answered all your questions!

In other news....
I have a winner to announce for the Willow House giveaway!
Congrats to Laurel from
like rain on a tin roof!

You are the lucky winner!

Please email me!

Laurel wrote that she would put her favorite cool quotes and unexpected "happy notes" for family and friends on the memo board!

I love that!
xoxo