It isn’t often that I get real personal in my postings. In this case however, I am making an exception. This one is very near and dear to my heart. We recently bought a home and discovered the prior tenants had done all sorts of horrible things to the kitchen with a can of brown paint. Actually not only had they painted the kitchen with brown paint, but indeed, they had painted the whole house with brown paint – poorly. To top that off, they also painted the bright brass knobs everywhere with brown paint – making them just look dirty and old. Ugh.
So how to correct an issue like this? Will the girlfriend and I are still going back and forth as to exactly what colors and how this all should be handled, I of course have my own ideas. Because these people put latex paint on top of polyurethane, the latex will probably peel pretty quickly. We’ve also discovered that the latex picked up the dirt from people’s hands using the knobs and looks absolutely filthy. Trying to clean off that paint just removes the paint itself. that leaves the original clearcoat visible. Which makes the whole kitchen look pretty ragged. We really didn’t want to have to redo all the cabinets, but it probably will end up requiring doing in the future.
The obvious and most “effective” way of handling this would be to thoroughly sand everything down to the wood, refinish and then rehang the cabinet doors. This would require painstaking effort on every door and cabinet in the kitchen. Still cheaper than buying a whole new set of cabinets and having them installed, but certainly time-consuming. The next option would be to strip off all the latex which should be possible with some general paint remover, to see if we could get back down to the original polyurethane finish, and then go from there. Just not sure which way to go. in my own mind, this comes down to if you noggin to do it right, just don’t do it. Maybe they didn’t understand that latex won’t stick to polyurethane like this without some advanced preparation which they didn’t do. Now we have nothing but a mess on our hands that will require some sort of fixing before too long.
Part of me just wants to go to Lowes.com and get new cabinets, but that would be more like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The cabinets are actually fine, just all rednecked up. a another part of me says call a local company like specialized refinishing and have them come out and knock this out in probably a day or two. I’ve already talked to them about refinishing the bathtubs in the house. All of them have seen better days, and it’s actually not that expensive to get a nice clean reglaze on your bathtub. while the bathtubs will look good refinished, I think it might be just nicer to replace the sinks in this bathroom areas. Also very possibly Mayor places sink in the kitchen, but I digress. That means I could very possibly knock out a couple three or four birds with a stone. It would obviously cost more than doing it myself, but it would be done quickly and life back to normal also quickly. then of course there’s the doing it myself – which is probably what will end up happening. Or the girlfriend – amazingly, she loves this kind of stuff. Perhaps I’ll just kick back and wait for HER to take care of this problem 🙂
looking at it in this picture above– it doesn’t look quite so atrocious, but up close and personal, this whole brown thing just doesn’t work. Some people should just NOT be trusted with a brush and a can of paint.