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Posts Tagged ‘kitchen cabinets’

Have Fun Choosing Your Kitchen Hardware

Friday, July 16th, 2010

If you’ve decided to replace or reface your kitchen cabinets, don’t shortchange yourself on hardware. Actually, I like looking at hardware just to see what’s new in terms of materials, colors, shapes, and styles. It’s almost overwhelming to narrow down your choices. Do you want bar pulls, granite inlay handles, art glass, or even the knobs of a favorite sports team? They’re available.

If you feel a cash pinch, remember that most major manufacturers and retailers carry a budget line of hardware products that are still attractive and made for durable wear. I discovered antique brass knobs for 60 cents and rustic pewter pulls for $3 that would suit a historical design to perfection.

Starting Your Cabinet Plans

Obviously, your first step is to set a ceiling on the amount you want to spend on new kitchen cabinets. If you can’t afford all the bells and whistles, remember that there are unfinished or pre-made cabinets that come ready to hang at discount prices. On the other hand, you might get by just having your existing cabinets refinished with new veneers.

If you decide on having your cabinets repainted, you have to remove existing hinges, pulls, knobs, and other hardware anyway. That gives you the perfect opportunity to visit home improvement stores, cabinet shops, or spin around on the Internet for hardware retailers. Sales come and go all the time.

I spent a few hours just surfing websites hawking bright colored ceramic knobs and pulls. If you do some digital window shopping before you finalize your plans, you might find yourself changing your entire theme after discovering exciting ways to dress up your kitchen.

Options for Cabinet Refacing

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

There are plenty of refacing options for your cabinets. You may be refacing them to change the look or style of your kitchen. Perhaps you’re considering refacing because the cabinet doors, hardware, or drawer fronts have fallen into disrepair. Or you may be readying your home for sale and want a alluring look in the kitchen.

One of the benefits of refacing is that you can change the look of your cabinets to match flooring, counters, or backsplashes that you’ve added over time that no longer fit with the old cabinet fronts.  Face Your Kitchen offers some great suggestions for refacing styles, including country, contemporary, romantic, old world, and craftsman.

Finding the Right Hardware

You should speak with your contractor about the kinds of hardware available for the refacing scheme. If you’re considering a country-style refacing project, you may want slightly distressed beadboard veneer along with open shelves for accents. Contemporary hardware is typically slender or sparse in ornamentation. Craftsman cabinetry is often highlighted by glass paneled doors and iron hardware.

Repair Home suggests using simple peel-and-stick backed veneer to change the color scheme. It’s a cost-effective way to achieve dramatic new effects without breaking the budget. Allison E. Beatty at Old House Web recommends coordinating lighting, flooring, and metal accents to complete the overall theme. She suggests hiring cabinet refacing professionals by their specialty in your era or period décor.

I’d add that unless you have direct successful experience in doing the job yourself, you get professional help. Potentially botching the job may mean sacrificing the considerable savings that a refacing produces over a complete new cabinet job.

Hanging Your Own Unfinished Cabinets? Beware.

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Unfinished kitchen cabinets offer incredible design flexibility for the self-installer homeowner. If your cabinets are prepped correctly when you get them, there’s only the primer, stain, and/or finish to consider. And you have a great of colors and hardware to customize your cabinets to match your overall kitchen scheme. Those are solid pluses. I can look at the choices at Lowes alone for several hours.

If you’re one of our readers who intends to install unfinished kitchen cabinets but has no experience, it’s obviously essential that you know what you’re up against.

Painting looks simple, but if you use too much stain and end up with dark cabinets that look horrible, you’re stuck with them. If you’re uneven in your application, you get splotches. You can spend time touching up light splotches only to end up with dark color splotches. I sympathize. Be sure to test your stain on an interior face.

Reliable Remodeler has a good guide to cabinet painting. And after paint, you’ve got an assembly job on your hands. Putting kitchen cabinets together is not as simple as many first-time DIYers imagine.

Aligning and Hanging Unfinished Cabinets

Before you bought your kitchen cabinet kit, you decided the location for your cabinets, measuring several times to be sure. Now you need to mark the wall in pencil, using a plumb line to create the top and bottom edges of your cabinets. Many homeowners forget to leave sufficient room between the bottom edge and the countertops.

Use a stud finder to position the alignment of the first upper cabinet. Mark in pencil the successive studs, each 16 inches apart. You want to attach each top cabinet to the matching stud. Hang the frames first, then assemble the cabinets on the floor, attach them to each other, and mount them as a unit.   Are you up to it?

If not, perhaps you’re a candidate for refacing with green veneers.

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