Kitchen Cupboard Project Update

Remember the Winter Project of 2008 that became a Continuing Saga and turned into the Day I Stripped… Paint? To cut to the chase, Hubby wanted to refinish the kitchen cupboards and so to ease me into the project we decided to refinish the pantry doors. It’s been 6 months since my last post on this. 6 months in which the pantry doors have sat partially sanded in the garage and I’ve tried not to think about them.

Hubby and I finally had the heart-to-heart where I said, Dude, I am not refinishing the kitchen cupboards with you. To which he replied, Well then you can paint the pantry doors white for all I care. To which I was like Dude, I just stripped white paint from one side of one of them, it took me a full day of my life that I can never get back, and we might as well as least finish the job on this.

The pantry doors sit forlorn but we have decided to finish them this summer. It might be more accurate to say Hubby has decided we will finish them this summer and I have agreed more to get off the topic than anything else. We will, I note, do the sanding in the backyard as when I sanded one side of one door in the garage the whole garage became covered in a fine layer of sawdust.

The Day I Stripped… Paint

Remember how last winter we were going to refinish the kitchen cupboards but watched Six Feet Under and ate desserts instead?

OK, we’re having a second go.

Today we decided to sand down the pantry doors, which are painted. They’ve been off the pantry for almost a year now. After several minutes of sanding that went nowhere we decided to buy paint stripper. This sounded to my uninitiated ears like it would be a simple and easy solution to the hassle of hours of sanding. I had this image of rubbing on a magical solution that would dissolve the paint and then we could put the new stuff on. I hopped off to the hardware store and ended up calling Hubby in the paint aisle.

“How much of this stuff should I buy?” I asked.

“That depends on the tragedy of it all,” he replied.

“Tragedy?”

“Yeah, whether we kill each other over the pantry doors or actually move on to the kitchen.”

While it may sound harsh to outside ears, this is actually a very generous comment. It has nothing to do with “us.” He means whether I throw a tantrum and refuse to do any more of it.

Hey, I was the one going “Condo, condo, condo” when we were home-hunting.

I bring home the paint stripper, apply it, realize its not mixed well enough, shake it, pour it, realize its not mixed well enough, shake it, pour it, let it sit for 20 minutes and then go to scrape off the “sludge,” realize I didn’t put near enough on, wait another 20 minutes. Hubby informs me we may have to do this 4 or 5 times. For each side. Of each of the two doors. And that’s only to get the paint off, not put the new stuff on. I remain silent.

The Kitchen Project Continues

The kitchen projects plugs gamely on in the sense that:

a. . it feels like its taking a long time

b. it feels normal now to have part of my kitchen “away”

The ways in which it is not plugging gamely on might consist of the fact that removing the cabinet doors is the ONLY thing we’ve done. No, wait, when we started the project, I set up the kitchen all nice – removed the trash can, stacked my 1970s orange Tupperware containers neatly, put the dishes away – and took a picture. A “before” picture. So, one might say that we have both removed the cabinet doors AND taken a “before” picture, thus accomplishing two pertinent steps of the process.

Note the still-there 5 cans of refried beans. And all the soup? Yeah, I don’t know what happened with that. One week I started buying soup and three weeks later I was still at it and then I was all like “Whoa, don’t need anymore soup.” So I was done, but when I went to the store that week I got all concerned that we were out of potato soup so I bought two cans and when I got home I found we already had 3. Then last week I went to heat up some tomato soup and we had none and I’m all, I just can’t master this soup thing.

Winter Project

So, its winter in Michigan. I do a lot of going to work in the snow, coming home in the snow, changing into PJs immediately, eating dinner with potatoes, rice, bread, pasta, etc., watching TV (Hubby and I are doing Six Feet Under from start to finish), going to bed, gaining weight. Hibernating.

We have some winter activities planned, like going to the ice sculpture competition in St. Joseph in a few weeks, and plans for dinner and a movie for Valentine’s Day, but for the most part we’re happy to curl up in the living room with blankets where conversation goes something like, “Wanna watch another episode?” “Yeah.” “Is there any dessert?” “Of course there’s dessert. Did you marry an incompetent?”

But we do have a winter project afoot. We’re going to refinish the kitchen cupboards. We would have started earlier but one of the core tools – a super-dooper German-made sander for edges and such – wasn’t available at Christmas and we had to order it.

I suggested that we paint the cupboards cranberry and the background royal blue. This was met by silence. Fifteen minutes later a volley suggestion was floated of going to lunch at Burger King (my blogging had left me waxing aloud about Whoppers). We’ll be maintaining the solid-birch without paint, courtesy of a $15 marital negotiation over Whoppers, fries and pies.

I might point out that each of the three layers of lacquer (perhaps polyurethane instead?) takes 45 minutes to dry before the next coat can be applied. Might I further point out that each episode of Six Feet Under (or The Tudors or Battlestar Gallactica or Star Trek for that matter) lasts between 40 and 50 minutes. Now, is this is the hand of a benevolent God at work or what?

Here is a shot of our tester cabinets (this is the built-in pantry and at some point someone painted it white [poor Hubby can only grit his teeth and declare, something like John Wayne, "I'll fix 'er, (hand gently caresses the doors) better than before even."]).

Here’s the hardware, we’ll be replacing it throughout the house as well – it is not only in the kitchen but in the built-in china cupboard and linen closet as well.

For those of you with that hint of voyeurism, here’s a few shelves inside my pantry. You might note that vegetables are not with vegetables, sauces are not with sauces, and nothing is in alphabetical order. It is roughly in the order in which it cames home from the grocery store. When I had considered this I decided to re-organize and found I had 5 cans of refried beans and that three of those were “family-sized.”