No disrespect to oak-colored cabinets and those who love them, but I knew from the day I met my new kitchen that the oak color just would not work with my vision for the most heavily used and deeply loved room of our house. No sooner did the words "I want to stain them darker" come out of my mouth than my husband began to hyperventilate.
Not that he didn't agree and not that he didn't want the same look, but his issue with the idea had to do with time commitment and possible failure. Doing it ourselves would clearly be cheaper from a dollar perspective, but with 38 cabinets, drawers and their faces to take down, sand, stain, poly, and re-attach, it would easily cost us days of our already limited family time to accomplish such a goal. And then there was the issue with possible failure since most cabinets that are installed in newer homes these days are laminate rather than actual wood, and the parts that are actual wood are generally covered in thick layers of polyurethane that is intended to prevent exactly what we intended to do: destroy the color of the wood underneath!
I'm not a person that generally responds well to being told 'No,' so I suggested an alternative to taking on the 38-cabinet kitchen: the 2-cabinet guest bathroom!
UPDATE:
Here is a Before picture of the Guest Bathroom that my husband snapped during the final walkthrough and was hiding on his phone. The stone tile, toilet, wood cabinet and mirror will be kept ... but that's about it:
My husband popped off the two cabinet doors, and we grabbed the necessary supplies from Lowe's. (Wood stain, sanding blocks and sandpaper sheets, rubber sponge brushes, polyurethane, a nylon paintbrush for applying the poly, etc.) We sanded down the doors with a power-sander and sanding blocks for the intricate edges, working hard to remove all traces of the polyurethane coating and getting down to the actual wood part underneath. Then we practiced staining the back of one of the doors with a Rust-oleum Black Cherry wood stain. (Ruin the back of one? Meh ...)
Lesson #1: You need to let that stain stuff marinade on lighter-colored cabinets.
That first layer of stain soaked in just fine, but it was not dark enough. We wanted such a drastic color change that we should have let the stain sink in a bit longer before wiping away the excess. As you can see by this picture, the goal was to stain the cabinet to match the toilet seat that I bought. (You can also see the original cabinet color behind the not-dark-enough door):
A second coat of stain on door #1 (pictured on top) and a first coat of stain on cabinet #2 (pictured on bottom), with proper soaking time, yielded the following:
You have no idea how giddy I was to see such a beautiful result!
A week passed before I had the chance to get back to these doors for applying the polyurethane and to the cabinet structure itself in the bathroom, so stay tuned! I learned a very, very painful lesson about polyurethane that you will not want to miss.
I dig the teaser at the end of this post!
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