Overview:
My wife and I bought Rustoleum's white color cabinet transformations kit after seeing a great sale at Home Depot. I researched it and saw decent reviews, so I decided to take the risk. We had to buy high quality paint brushes and some other supplies. We had to give up a long weekend to work on it. In the end, we are happy with the results. As a matter of fact, for the last week, every time I walk into my kitchen, I smile because things look so much better. That said, there are some important things you will need to know before you make this purchase and spend your time and money on this kit.
Who should buy this?
The overall reviews for the kit are positive, but I have a feeling that most of the negative reviews have something in common: wrong expectations. If you have a beautiful kitchen, but you've been watching the latest episodes on HGTV about the new "it" color or style for kitchen cabinets, this is NOT for you. Seriously. You will likely ruin your perfectly fine cabinets and be very disappointed. Remember, you are PAINTING your cabinets. It is not going to look as pretty as cabinets from the factory or specially made just for you. Be honest here. If your friends and neighbors think your cabinets look fine and your cabinets look at least as good as theirs, don't buy this. It will not go well for you. That's my opinion at least.
Now if your cabinets make you want to punch yourself in the face every time you walk into the kitchen, but you cannot afford to punch yourself in the face because your budget is so tight, you might have found your perfect solution. Again, don't fool yourself.
Details:
The box comes with a nice DVD for instructions. Watch it several times and just before each new step. You think you know what you are doing, but you probably don't. They have good advice so follow it. You also have a deglosser in the kit. This is hands down the most difficult and work-intensive step of repainting your cabinets. It took my wife and I nearly 6 hours to complete this step together, and we only have 9 cabinet doors and two drawers. We actually read that the included deglosser wasn't that great, so we bought krud kleener's deglosser instead. I can't speak for the include deglosser since we didn't use it, but Krud Kleener was amazing. We followed that up with a brillo pad on a hand sander to rough up the surface of the cabinets even more. We should have taken more time to sand down bumps and other such stuff though because these showed up once we had finished, but it wasn't terrible.
We had darker stained wood (fake wood?) cabinets and doors and were changing them to white. Our kit had two quarts of paint. This was just enough for us. We had to do three coats of paint on each door because of the difference in color from dark to white. I also believe this is the main reason that our doors look painted. The wood grain had trouble showing through the three layers of paint. It seems that going to a darker color allows the wood grain to come through better. Like I said earlier. This is not a problem for us because our cabinets were bad enough that we were still happy. Take your time painting. Make sure the paint does not drip or pool up in corners. Otherwise you will have to sand them down later. Also, paint in as thin as coats as you possibly can. The thinner the coats, the more likely you'll be able to keep the wood grain showing. Each coat of paint took us about 1.5 hours to finish, and we had to give 2-3 hours in between for drying. It took about 9 hours of painting the bond coat altogether (remember you have to do one side of the doors 3x and then the other side 3x so it takes longer than you expect).
There is an option step to glaze your cabinets. Since we wanted pure white in our kitchen, we didn't bother since it makes the cabinets more antique looking in the white. I can't say much about it, but most of the online reviews and examples think it is a very important and much improving step. You'll have to trust them on that one.
Our last step was to put the protective coat of polyurethane on it. I was super nervous about this as many people said everything was fine up until this point. We scoured the nets to see what to do. Many suggested dropping money for a more expensive top coat. We decided to give the kit a try. It worked fine. I added two tablespoons of water to the top coat to give us more time to work with it. We worked as a team. I applied a generous layer of the top coat all along the surface of the door while my wife cleaned up excess and smoothed the finish out with 3in and 1 inch foam brushes. It took a long time and we had to do two coats instead of one since we wiped away a lot of the topcoat, but in the end, the finish was smooth and clean. It also helped remove the excess topcoat which will dry yellow if it pools on the white surface. I think it was a lot easier doing the topcoat on the white surface though, so if you are going dark, you may want to consider buying the better topcoat.
The end result is much better than what we started with. If you are more than 3-5 feet away, the cabinets look amazing. I mean, the look like Martha Stewart would be proud. Get within that range though, and you can see that it was painted. It's not horrible, but it's definitely not as perfect as the white cabinets you see in home goods stores.
Final thoughts:
We got the kit for half the cost you would pay normally. This made it a good deal. If I had been more knowledgeable about this stuffy beforehand, I think I would have bought the supplied separately. You end up with higher quality products (even if you still with Rustoleum branded paints) and it will be cheaper in the end. Still, not knowing any of this beforehand, the kit gave me the idea to paint the cabinets and the courage to try it. For that, it was well worth it.
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