This post is a continuation of Goodbye Oak, Hello Black Cherry.
After successfully staining the backs of both cabinet doors, we flipped them over and began to stain the fronts.
Lesson #2: You cannot be lazy with the power-sander.
They must put a lot more polyurethane on the fronts of these cabinet doors than the backs because we clearly did not sand them down enough before applying the first coat of stain. See how smudgy the stain is? Yuck:
We had to follow up this coat with another round of sanding, which destroyed most of the first coat, but it was worth it to get the right soak-age the next time around. Once we finally got through that darn polyurethane (a.k.a. the bane of my DIY existence!), we applied another coat (maybe two? I can't remember) to get the desired black cherry glow:
Cabinet Door #1
Cabinet Door #2
Aren't they gorgeous?! I was so excited! I think I danced. (In fact, I'm pretty sure I danced.)
We let the doors dry and lived our regularly scheduled programming for a few more days until an opportunity to apply the polyurethane presented itself finally. This past Sunday, I got everything back out on the deck and prepared to do the final step, thinking the entire time that the hardest part was over. I mean, come on... the wood grain was still showing through on two darker, beautifully stained cabinet doors and now it was time to apply some protective coating that would seal in our awesome craftmanship. This part was going to be cake, right?!
WRONG.
Lesson #3: Don't Get Cocky.
Why I chose to start with the front of cabinet door #1, I do not know, and the decision still haunts me. What you see here is the result of using the WRONG type of polyurethane for this particular job: Minwax Ultra-Fast Drying White Satin brush-on Polyurethane. We now know that every part of that product's name is wrong, wrong, wrong for this project! "Ultra-fast drying" and "white satin" and "brush-on" were a really bad move on our part.
The white color didn't tip me off right away as a bad thing because it was drying clear as I brushed it on, but then I realized that it was drying really, really fast! I couldn't get it to spread evenly before it dried in big drops and thick lines, especially in the crevices and on the corners. I was working furiously, trying to beat the poly and cover everything gently and equally as best I could.... but it was a total disaster. By the time I had gone over the entire thing, I had completely ruined it.
I called for backup, insisting that my husband please tell me what I had done so wrong and why polyurethane hates me so badly. We decided that the particular kind of poly that we bought was definitely not the right kind for this project, and that we were (ok, I was) going to have to sand off what I'd done. Sanding would undoubtedly scratch up the final coat of stain, which would set me back a couple of steps in the process. I was FURIOUS!
Here's my terrible poly application on cabinet door #1. See how chunky and scratchy and white it looks, especially on that corner?
Here you can see more of the crappy poly job up close. Note the gaping hole in the poly layer and the white poly build-up in the crevice of door #1.
As I sat there on the deck and fumed over my failure, my husband disappeared briefly and then reappeared with an aerosol can of something. It was a can of Minwax Fast-Drying (not Ultra) Clear Gloss (not White Satin) spray-on (not brush-on) polyurethane that he'd had in the garage for some mysterious reason.
He grabbed cabinet door #2, scolding me (gently) for being cocky and not practicing the poly application on the back side first (which was fair), and he sprayed the back side of #2 with the other kind of poly.
It went on beautifully, as you can see below. It was everything I had expected the first application to look like! All the poly did was make everything shiny. There was nothing else visibly noticeable about it. My husband totally saved the day! After letting the back side dry, I sprayed down the front side later that afternoon.
And here's a corner of door #2 so that you can see how the poly is supposed to look up close:
*Sigh* With door #2 finished, it was then time to bite the bullet and fix door #1. I plugged in the power sander and pulled as much of the poly off as I could that afternoon before having to wrap up and go do other things. Here's what the cabinet doors look like today, side by side. The finished door looks black in this photo, but the color really is a dark cherry, especially in the wood grain marks. The unfinished door looks like crap, and I do not have all of the bad poly sanded off of the crevices and corners yet.
On a lighter note, somewhere in the midst of all the cabinet door drama, I managed to get the first coat applied to the cabinet itself. See how the color now matches the toilet seat? My only issue is the oak-colored interior of the cabinet, but I have a crafty solution for that which will be revealed in a future post!
In addition to fixing my Poly Mess of this past weekend and applying the final stain and poly to the cabinet itself, I will be trying to find time this week for painting the walls in the guest bathroom. (We have a wedding in the family, so I'm not optimistic that we'll get to this before Sunday.) From there, I'll be ready to start staining the mirror frame that I'm going to make out of a long baseboard stick that my husband is going to cut for me, and I think he's going to start installing the backsplash. Niether of us have done either of these upcoming projects, so there are many more learning experiences for us on the horizon!
I cannot wait for the Big Reveal on our Guest Bathroom project! It's going to be the best-looking room in our house come Halloween, I just know it!
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