Nine Red: China Cabinet Makeover

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

China Cabinet Makeover

Hello again! Ralphy & I have finally gotten back into painting furniture! Feels so good. While moving here was a wonderful thing, I did lose my workshop, meaning we can only paint when the weather allows. Which luckily in California, is fairly often. I've got my eye on under the house to be a future workshop, but that will take a lot of time, and probably a lot of money. So for now, we work out in the sun under the glorious redwood trees. I guess it could be worse. . .

So in our kitchen, one thing was missing. A refrigerator! Of course we have one, but the only place for it was just outside the kitchen, in the entryway, facing the living room. And when the door was open, no one was coming in or out of that room. It bugged me:

So once we had a spot across the room for it (pics soon, it's terribly ugly right now!) it was time to fill the old spot with something special. And after scouring craigslist for a bit, we found this solid wood beauty for a mere $140..

It was the perfect size! It's more than I would usually pay for something we were going to give a makeover, but the fact that it was immediately available & the perfect size shows it was meant to be, and I forked over the cash.

I think it was painted in oil paint, the black was really pretty & very soft to the touch. Actually, the couple we bought from said it had been red, green, you name it. But we were craving color. Strong color. Perhaps it's living in a light challenged home, or perhaps it's us craving summertime, we both knew what color we wanted. Cozumel. No doubt....

After Ralph gave her a serious dusting, it was time to tape up the glass. Normally I'd just remove the glass, but this thing looks to be about 80 years old, and the glass was held in with teeny tiny tacks & pieces of wood that I KNEW would splinter, break, shatter, etc as soon as I took them off. So yea, taping sucks, but re-installing 80 year old glass sucks worse. Pick your battles.

Oh look, a drawer.

PAINT DETAILS! Ok, many people have questions about the color, brand, etc of paint we'll use on a certain project, so here it is:

Behr Paint & Primer in one, Interior, flat finish.
Color: Cozumel. They don't always have a card for this color, but just go up to the counter and ask for Behr's Cozumel. They have it, and we love it.

Halfway through painting I realized I forgot a mask. Don't do that unless you want to sneeze cozumel, too.

We chose to not sand. We had the primer in the paint which sticks to most surfaces REALLY well, and we had planned to let this naturally age and show the black through. So laziness + supposed planning ahead = long lasting paint job that always looks like you meant it. Yay!

We are using a lovely HVLP Gravity feed gun connected to our air compressor. I believe the brand is husky, I got it at home depot. I found the same on on Amazon right here, however. And actually that's a better price, I should of done that. But it's the same one, and I adore it.

Floetrol: Paint on it's own can be a little thick for my little gun, so you have to water it down a bit with Floetrol. I do a ratio of 1 part floetrol, to 4 parts paint. Stir in a separate cup, and dump in. Floetrol also helps smooth out the bumps, it's kind of magical to watch. I use it sometimes when I brush by hand for the same reason, bye bye brushstrokes. Here's a Link to Floetrol if you've never seen it before.

Reeach! Can you tell I'm vertically challenged?

Lookin good! That took about 30 minutes (I knoooow!) and we let it dry while we went inside for cocktails. Luckily the hardware was already pretty nice, so that saved some cash. Oh, guess what we forgot!? The SHELVES..... and we realized it after we put the paint away. Though I'm so glad we did.... look at the black shelves:

I love it! So much better than a refrigerator in our hall/entryway/awkward area.. the black shelves look really nice in my opinion, and when the black coat underneath comes shining through over the years, it will compliment nicely.

View from the kitchen side of things:

Remember before....

Then of course we had to start playing with what will go inside... the original plan was to cover the back of the glass in a cute fabric, but we fell in love with it as is. So it stays clear.

I'm really happy with how this came out! What do you think, should we have left the fridge? Haha... no. Do you see that miniature wind chime in the pic above? It's in the lower left corner. That... is amazingly... for our cats. Yep - we have the indoor/outdoor cats totally trained to ring a little bell when they want to go outside. Spoiled beasts.

Have a good one!

-Jesse

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