When I moved into my new home, I loved the potential of the kitchen. Notice I said “potential.” It was spacious, had tons of cabinets and counter space, but was an amalgam of several previous tenant’s attempts to polish it. For starters, the cabinets were painted with about four coats of globbed-on white paint. The countertops were a white laminate that looked like it had been their from the 50’s. The kitchen looked like a mental institution kitchen. The floors, which were made from compressed particle board, were water damaged, caving in and masked by indoor/outdoor green carpet. To make matters worse, the walls, which were all barely nailed-up paneling, were covered with this awful yellow wallpaper, so before I went crazy (like the madwoman in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper), I decided to take matters into my own hands and give my kitchen a makeover. If you are considering doing the same, here are some of my hits and misses that will hopefully assist you in remodeling your kitchen.
Stripping Kitchen Cabinets
Hit: I decided to restore the cabinets back to wood, which required about ten cans of paint stripper, a wire brush, and a lot of elbow grease. It took three coats of stripper to finally reveal the wood underneath the endless sea of paint, but after i stripped off all of the paint, I was able to sand and stain them a beautiful walnut color and they look gorgeous now. If you want wood cabinets, but they are painted, this is your only route, unless you want to shell out thousands on new cabinets. It is a lot of hard work, but the results are worth it.
Miss: I made the catastrophic mistake of replacing the floor with tile before I stripped the cabinets. After flinging paint stripper and paint chips all over the floor (which is inevitable), it ate through the tile and left blotches, so I had to replace the floor with laminate after, as well. If you do decide to strip your kitchen cabinets, be prepared to sacrifice a lot of stuff because it eats through everything.
Applying Laminate Sheeting to Counters
Hit: Laminate sheeting is an inexpensive, but effective way to remodel your countertops. I found a beautiful blue/gray, marblesque laminate for about $20 per 8 foot piece. It was gorgeous and made my remodeling job appear to cost thousands. Applying laminate is relatively easy if you have the tools to do it with. You will need a table saw or a mitar saw to cut through the laminate. They say you can score it with a blade and bend it to get a perfect cut edge, but after trying that method on a small piece, I can attest that you cannot cut it in that manner. It peeled off a part of the laminate, so that piece had to be thrown away.
Miss: You must use contact cement to glue the laminate sheeting to the existing countertop. If there is already laminate covering your counter, don’t worry. You can just put the new laminate on top of the old. However, when you apply the contact cement, you must let it dry for about 45 minutes before laying down the laminate. It will appear to be dry and feel tacky to the touch. This is normal and necessary for the laminate to adhere to the countertop. I made the mistake of thinking the contact cement had to be wet, so after putting the laminate sheet down, it would not adhere no matter how hard I tried, so when I pulled it up, it had stringy stuck-on glue that had to be peeled off inch by inch. Take my advice- wait for the contact cement to dry and become tacky.
Laying Laminate Flooring
Hit: Laminate flooring is inexpensive and looks like you spent thousands on hard wood. If you are looking to update your floors, consider laminate. The new laminate flooring actually was the best looking part of my kitchen remodeling (so the “miss” with stripping the cabinets actually turned out for the better). Everyone complimented the floor. It looks great.
Miss: This is a two-person job. Since laminate flooring is a “floating floor,” it has a tongue and groove edging that snaps into place. The only difficulty is that you have to assemble an entire strip and pop it onto the previous section in one step, which requires multiple people. I doubt one person could do this job alone without extreme aggravation and difficulty.
If you are considering updating your kitchen, do not underestimate your ability to remodel it yourself. You will save thousands of dollars not hiring contractors and you will have the pride of remodeling your kitchen yourself. For someone who can barely hammer a nail, I was amazed that I was able to remodel my entire kitchen. If I can remodel my kitchen, you can remodel your kitchen!
