High on Cabinets

We survived day one of our cabinet staining project. Spoiler alert: the two things Andrew and I couldn't stop repeating were "why didn't we do this earlier?" and "why couldn't we do this when we were younger? My body is too old for this."

After Andrew built a shelf for me, we decided to split duties. Since I did an awful job staining yesterday, I decided to stay inside and start properly cleaning the cabinets for staining. I'd finished all the doors and drawers in the morning, but needed to do all of the other surfaces and tape all the interior.

After about an hour, I decided to take a break and check on Andrew (since the picture below was taken right as he had gotten started). I walked out to the garage and he was on cabinet #3. "Don't they look great?" he asked.

I refrained from asking, "Are you high?" Instead I went for "when are you going to wipe off the stain? You have to wipe it off after 3 minutes."

"You have to wipe it off?"

I am lucky that my husband loves me, because he forgave me pretty quickly for the not-nice things that followed from my mouth.

"You didn't read the directions?" I said.

"No, I thought it was like the other stuff we've used." (Keep in mind, we have used every kind of stain in existence at some point in our house.)

"You saw me screw up yesterday and decided not to read the directions?" This was the kindest thing I could think to say. So I kept on repeating it. In a not-very kind manner.

Andrew got the boot from staining after that, but he did go back to the internet to try to salvage one of the three goobered cabinet fronts by washing and scrubbing it clean. I was able to re-stain and then rub off the goop from the other two. All three now look just fine. 

Ironically, the only two cabinet fronts that I couldn't fix were the two I goobered on Friday (below).

So, that is the story of how I stained all the cabinets and drawers while Andrew finished washing and taping the kitchen.

Pretty!

By about 4pm, we both descended on the kitchen and started staining inside. I knew the cabinet doors and drawers were looking pretty good, but I was curious what the color would look like inside.

We were floored. Above, in the bottom right corner, is a peek of the difference. We didn't want the cabinets to be too dark, but we wanted the tone to be more deep and reddish to match the rest of the woodwork in the house. The stain brought out the grain - which looked really nice, even though we're certain these are pretty basic cabinets from Lowe's or Menard's.

Here's another comparison photo. Left is pre-stain and right has been stained. Subtle, but a definite difference.

Tomorrow we have a crazy day- we've already decided that we need to go to early church, and we have plans with friends later on. Still, we are hoping to the poly coat on everything.

If that isn't interesting enough, we are trying to rush to have our house a little more back together by Sunday night. The lady who had been doing house cleaning for us quit earlier in the summer due to her cat allergy, and Monday is the first time a new person will be cleaning for us. She is highly recommended by a co-worker, so we didn't want to cancel on her (we'd been playing phone tag and had to cancel a few weeks ago when I came down with a fever - so canceling twice wouldn't look good for us), and now I am worried that she'll see our kitchen and walk right back out!

But as Andrew pointed out, anyone who comes to our house on a regular bias should probably get used to the fact that we regularly tear apart our house in the name of progress. True.

Back to tomorrow's plan - I am just hoping that we can get the contents of our shelves (though probably not the drawers) back in the kitchen and not on our dining room table. Bonus if we can get cabinet drawers and doors on by Tuesday.

We pretty much trashed our paint brushes, so we made another Menard's run tonight. While we were there, I couldn't help but dream up new hardware to go with the deeper stain.

This stuff is going on my Christmas list, since we have hardware that is only 6 years old and in perfectly good shape. But a girl can dream. And I did.

And speaking of dreams, I think we will both be sleeping well tonight. Even though we can both tell that this project has been totally worth the effort, we are both creaky and achy (and a little whiny?) - not good signs heading into tomorrow's adventure.