One Room Challenge Kitchen – Week No. 2

Welcome to week two of my One Room Challenge Kitchen remodel. This week we will be tackling the cabinet demolition and getting the thermofoil cabinets painted as we work our way towards this:

For those of you who aren’t familiar, The One Room Challenge™ is a biannual interior design blog and Instagram event. In each round, twenty design influencers are selected to take the challenge as Featured Designers, and transform a space and any blogger or Instagrammer can join as ORC Guest participants by linking their room transformation each week. Every Wednesday, the designers document their process while sharing their sources and professional advice over eight weekly posts. 

WEEK 1 / WEEK 2 (You are here)  / WEEK 3 / WEEK 4 / WEEK 5 / WEEK 6 / WEEK 7 / WEEK 8 – REVEAL

Be sure to check out other ORC Featured Designers and Guest Participants over at The One Room Challenge!

I also want to give a big thanks to Lights.com and Amerock for gifting products to help complete this project.

Demolition

This week the kitchen remodel is well underway so there is no turning back now, I am all in! If you came here this week for pretty pictures, you are out of luck. Today it is all about demo so it is going to get worse before it gets better…

The kitchen started off looking a little something like this when we began.

but quickly dissolved to this…

and this… I guess this is the worse part.

Progress

I removed the upper cabinets permanently but the lowers I will be painting so all the doors had to be removed. If you remember last week I told you that the cabinets are made of MDF and coated in thermofoil. In my case, the cabinets were already starting to show their wear. The thermofoil had already begun to peel so I continued the process of peeling all the foil from the fronts. The backs of the doors are laminate, not Thremofoil so the backs stayed as-is.

Since the backs were laminate and not to be painted I laid the doors flat and used my Wagner Paint Sprayer (affiliate) to paint two coats of primer.

Then I added two coats of Vaslpar Cabinet & Furniture Paint which is a hard drying oil enrich enamel paint that is much sturdier than latex paint.

I did not want to paint the interior of the cabinet boxes so I focused only on the areas that would be exposed when the cabinets were closed. These parts of the cabinets are laminate and do not hold paint well so I sanded the exposed edges with heavy grit sandpaper to rough them up for better paint adhesion. These areas also go coats of primer and paint as well.

While all the cabinet parts were drying the electrician came in to install the new recessed lights and install junction boxes for the new decorative lighting.

In retrospect, it would probably have been better to make this mess with the cabinet doors on. Oh well, if it means we don’t have fluorescent lighting anymore it was worth it.

All in all, it Has been a productive week. I’m glad to strike a few things off the To-Do list to get the ball rolling.

THE TO DO LIST

• Demo cabinets
• Peel Thermofoil and paint cabinets
• Run new electrical for lighting and hood
• Reinstall cabinet and drawer fronts
• Repair Drywall
• Paint ceiling
• Install new tile behind hood and on bar front
• Build out soffit and microwave cabinet
• Paint hood
• Install hood
• Trim out soffit and repair crown molding
• Bar top construction
• Install floating shelves
• Tile back of bar
• Install cabinet hardware
• Install wallpaper