It was the moment Laura had been waiting for! We had taken photos, I imported them into my drawing app, and we had played around with endless color schemes. We had chosen our colors and we had collected the materials to do the job. This, is the story of when Laura finally got to re-finish the cabinets!
So Off Came The Doors And Out Came The Paint!
Not just the cabinet doors… Laura pulled the front door too. She used bed-lining it as the appetizer to her feast of paints!
Meanwhile, I had my assignment. I was to fullfill Laura’s wish of taking care of this feature in our RV kitchen…
We had made a plan and purchased the materials, now it was time for me to do the action!
After a few back and forths, a few cuts, a bit of insulation to keep the new skin snug around the vent pipe, and some finagling of the metal in to place, we were looking much better!
So while Laura was working on prepping all of her cabinet doors, I got on to prepping the subfloor for painting. I used up the rest of my subflooring glue to fill the seams and edges, but it wasn’t quite enough to keep the floor from having low points. So I tried out this idea; I used Gaco tape to trim it out. I mean, why not? I had used Gaco tape to patch some of the old chair mounting holes in the cab of Serenity when I replaced her seats.
Afterwards I painted the tape with bed-liner and it worked great! So I decided to use that stumbled upon knowledge here.
Since Laura was in extreme painting mode, I traded out with her when the prep was done. She was going to paint the floor, and I was going to repair the 2 drawers from the kitchen.
As Laura got her first layer of bed-liner down I had was wrapping up the drawers. There was a lot of cabinet door work to do, so the dream was by the end of the day or the next day we the floor would be dry enough to install our cabinet doors!
They drawers were pretty much toast, but with enough glue, screws, and some brackets I was able to give these drawers a second run at life. With the floor painted and the glue on the drawers drying, it was time to get down to painting some cabinet doors!
Laura decided we were going to try and salvage the original gold trim, repaint it silver, and re-install it on the door edges.
We began by spraying the framing of the doors with a couple coats of red spray paint. We liked the way the paints only lightly soaked into the oak frame, and allowed the grain and texture to show through. Here was my “spray station”.
And here is an honest shot of my spray station; with Cherry & Josie doing their usual helping method…
We then painted the center panels of the doors with a brick red. The thicker paint was great for hiding the blemishes of scraps, dings, and old command strip scarring.
After we had created our newly silvered door trim, we set about playing “match the door” and super gluing the pieces into place.
So here is a fun little part of this “silver trim” story…
Laura had actually pulled the gold trim from the cabinet doors a little while before we painted. We had set it all aside, but as we got to the very last cabinet door, and went to search out the very last piece, it was missing. We searched everywhere to no avail. I tried to make a new piece made out of wood, but in the end shape and the way the material took the paint looked way out of place next to the original plastic trim. After a whole bunch of experimenting, I decided to try a different approach. I took a piece of left over rubber base cove we had, used the curbed portion of the lip at the bottom, and carefully cut it to fit. After a few layers of paint we had our match! Once it was installed, you can’t tell the difference. Whew!!! We almost had an epic fail on our part, especially since it was the very last piece! 😰
Part way through the day Laura threw on the second coat of bed-liner.
And with the floor and cabinet doors and drawers painted we ended the day- excited to wake up the next day to put it all together!
That morning, soon as we confirmed the floor was dry enough to walk on we were loading in and installing cabinet doors.
We would have to await the cabinet pulls we had ordered to arrive in the mail. But with that, our new cabinet doors had been created!
Now it was time to finally tackle the big, bad, mamajama, project we had all been waiting for. That’s right folks! We finally had the budget so we had finally purchased the product, the weather forecast was giving us a good stretch of decent weather, and our minds were set; next it was time to Gaco Our Ohana!
Geoff Murphy 7/19/2020