For about $6 per cabinet door, you can freshen up the look of your kitchen, and it won't be out of commission while you work. Put on new hinges and pulls, clean all the kitchen grime off, apply a new finish, and cut decorative grooves.
Short of a major addition, remodeling a kitchen is the most expensive home improvement project you’ll ever undertake. And by far the most expensive part of this project is replacing or refacing the cabinets -- so what’s the solution? There are millions of kitchens that could be brought out of the Dark Ages if the cabinets received new hardware, a good cleaning, a fresh finish and perhaps some creative accents.
This article will tell you how to perform this cosmetic kitchen surgery for only $6 and 30 minutes per door or drawer. For this average kitchen, the whole project took 20 hours and $250. Another benefit is that your kitchen won’t be out of commission while you work.
For this makeover, I removed and replaced all the hinges and handles, cleaned and refinished the doors, and cut and painted grooves in the faces. The plain-looking kitchen was reborn with a more stylish Craftsman appearance.
Goof-Proofing Tip:
Before you remove the doors and drawers, mark their location with a tape label and place it on the back.
How Far Should You Go?
One of the nicest features of this project is that you can take it as far as you want. For instance, you can stop after simply cleaning and refinishing the doors. On these doors, I noticed a dramatic difference simply after cleaning off 35 years of kitchen grease, grime and broken-down finish -- this cleaning made the wood grain reappear after years in hiding. The wood grain stood out even more after the finish coats were applied. However, the birch plywood doors on these cabinets have a very subtle grain
pattern, unlike oak or ash, so I decided they needed more drama and added the painted grooves for contrast. Your doors may not need that extra help. Or maybe you can develop your own groove pattern.
I replaced the old hinges on these cabinets with new self-closing ones. Self-closing hinges are convenient and less obtrusive. They also let you toss all those old door catches that get in the way when you use your cabinets.
Choosing New Hardware
Goof-Proofing Tip:
You can also fill the old hinge and knob holes using wax sticks. It’s easier to fill a hole level with wax and you won’t need to spot-finish afterward. However, wax sticks come in only eight colors and you can’t blend them for an exact match.
The kind of doors you have will dictate your hinge choice. The doors you see here, very common on older standard cabinets, have a 3/8-in. rabbeted inset with a 3/8-in. overlay (see Photo 2). This type of door makes using a completely concealed hinge problematic, if not impossible. So, I chose face-mounted hinges made for an inset door. To make the face-mounted hinges less obtrusive, I used black lines and black knobs, plus a hinge color that blends with the wood. This method works because the black details draw attention away from the hinges. Face-mounted hinges are available at home centers and lumberyards for $3 a
pair.
If your doors don’t have the routed inset, but instead have a partial or full overlay, you’ll use a different type of hinge. You may want to use a concealed, cup-style hinge that mounts to the cabinet’s interior. These hinges cost $5 to $8 a pair and are available at lumberyards and woodworking stores. They require some special tools and are harder to install than face-mounted hinges, but they’re a good option if you want a higher-quality, adjustable hinge.
Use a Jig for Fast, Accurate Knob Placement
I chose 1-1/4 in. black steel knobs ($3 at a home center) instead of pulls or handles for this project. Center the doorknobs so they fall on the diagonal line formed by the corner of the door and the intersection of the bottom and side grooves in the door face (see the jig in Photo 8). Put drawer knobs in the exact center of the drawer. If your drawer faces are all the same height, you’ll need only one hole for drawer knobs in your jig.
The bolts that come with your knobs usually work fine on the doors, but drawer construction varies and you often need a longer screw for the drawer. Ideally, the screw should be 3/8 to 1/2 in. longer than the material is thick. So, measure your drawer thickness, then pick up some 1-1/4 or 1-1/2 in. x 8/32 in. bolts if needed.
Watch for Trouble Spots
We found three potential trouble spots in this project:
If you have an ornate valance over the sink, you may want to remove it. The style may not work well with the project shown
here.
Most sink cabinets have a false front above the doors. You’ll have to remove this piece to rout the grooves. Sometimes it will be held in place with wooden cleats that are easily turned. But other times it will be held with glued cleats, and you’ll have to use a chisel and a hammer to knock these cleats off, but the front will come out.
It’s also possible that you’ll have a pair of doors without a center stile. They usually have a pair of drawers above them that do have a gap between the drawer faces. This creates a problem with the groove alignment. To solve it, don’t cut vertical grooves on the sides of the drawer faces above the spot where the doors meet. This way, the drawer faces won’t have grooves that don’t line up; instead they’ll look more like the wide false front by the sink.
Goof-Proofing Tip:
If a new hinge hole happens to align with a larger existing hole on the face frame, clean out the old hole. Next, put dabs of glue on the ends of toothpicks and break the toothpick tips off in the hole. Then drive the new screw.
Selecting a Finish
For our project, I used amber-tinted shellac as a primer. Shellac will stick to any kind of finish, so you don’t need to know what’s on your cabinets (though it’s probably lacquer). Also, the amber tint added a warm, rich color to the doors.
When you buy the shellac, don’t stir it. It contains settled wax on the bottom that may interfere with the final finish. Separate the good finish by pouring off the clearer liquid into a separate container. Don’t use the milky cream at the bottom of the can.
For the final finish, I used water-based polyurethane because shellac by itself isn’t durable enough for a kitchen. Water-based polyurethane is very tough, and since both it and shellac are fast-drying, the finish is less likely to attract dust (and you can use your kitchen sooner).
Special Tools and Materials
Sharp chisel
Rotary tool and pointed cutter bit
Amber-tinted shellac
Water-based polyurethane
Latex enamel paint for grooves
Tack cloth
Small paint brush
Oil-based wood filler
Router and router table
3/16-in. straight carbide router bit
Self-centering hinge bit
Spring clamps
Replacement hinges and knobs
1. Clean the dirty doors, drawer faces and cabinets by lightly rubbing them with mineral spirits and No. 0000 steel wool or
synthetic steel wool. Work in a well-ventilated area. Too much rubbing will create lightened areas. If you have stubborn black stains left by hardware, apply oxalic acid (available at home centers) with a cotton swab (follow manufacturer’s directions). Rinse off the acid as soon as the stain disappears. If you accidentally lighten an area too much, apply a matching gel stain to the spot and let it dry before proceeding.
Click image to enlarge.
2. Rout the grooves in the door and drawer faces with a router and router table equipped with a 3/16-in. straight bit set to cut 1/8 to 3/16 in. deep. Firmly set the router fence to cut the center of the groove 1-1/4 in. from the door’s edge. Make a trial run on scrap plywood, then make the cuts slowly and carefully. Brush the sawdust out of the grooves with a toothbrush.
3. Apply two coats of amber-tinted or clear shellac to the routed door face. Use a tack cloth to clean the doors before the first and between subsequent coats. The shellac acts as a primer because it will bond to any finish on your old doors. Clean the brushes with denatured alcohol. After the shellac dries, apply two coats of water-based polyurethane (fast-drying) like Minwax’s Polycrylic. Sand lightly between coats.
TIP
You’ll use many different finishes and cleanup solutions for this project. Set all the saturated rags outside to dry, then dispose of them in an outdoor trash container.
4. Fill the old hardware holes in the doors, drawers and cabinet frames after the final coat of finish is dry. To match the color exactly, mix two or more shades of oil-based wood putty. After filling the holes, spot-finish the putty with shellac (water-based poly-urethane won’t stick to the putty). For blackened holes like the one shown, use a rotary tool with a pointed cutter bit to dig out the black areas before filling.
TIP
If you need to sand the grooves, wrap a piece of sandpaper around a paint stirrer stick and run it down the grooves a
few times.
5. Paint your door grooves with a complementary color in latex enamel paint. Match color from hardware, countertops or appliances. With latex, be as sloppy as you want -- any paint that slops outside the grooves can be removed with a damp rag if you do it quickly. It will take two coats for complete coverage.
6. Attach the self-closing hinges to the doors. Because these doors originally had face-mounted hinges on 3/8-in. inset doors, we used a sharp chisel to make a notch (equal to the hinge thickness) on the inside of the cabinet door so that inset doors would fit into the cabinet opening just as they did before. Install door bumpers (they often come with the hinges) inside the lip on the opposite side of the hinges so the door will rest evenly on the cabinet frame.
TIP
Hinge screws break easily. Use a small self-centering hinge bit to predrill the screw holes for the hinges. The bit can be set to keep you from drilling through the door face. Also, lubricate the screws by dipping them in wax before driving them.
7. Mount the self-closing hinge to the face frame. To find where to predrill holes, first flip the hinge back as it would be if the door were open. Second, position the door and, if possible, have a helper hold it down firmly -- the self-closing feature of the hinge will try to kick the door out of position. Finally, flip the mounting lip down and locate your holes. To align a pair of doors, use spring clamps to secure a thin, straight board to the bottom of the cabinet’s face frame.
8. Use a homemade jig to accurately and uniformly place the knobs or handles on the doors and drawers. Make it from a 6 x 6 x 3/4-in. block of wood and two thin straight boards (one short and one long) about 1-1/8 in. wide (paint stirrer sticks work well) screwed to the sides of the block. On the long lip (12 in.), mark a rule, starting at the center line for drawer knobs. To use the rule, you’ll have to divide the width of a particular drawer in half. To use the jig on a drawer face, remove the short lip from the block. Use two heavy-duty spring clamps to hold the jig in place.
