In our house we have a weird space between our kitchen and a family room. The previous owners had a small little table and bar chair set up. In our opinion, the space is a little too small/awkward for table and chairs. It’s also in front of the back door, so it’s been hard to utilize the area efficiently. After we remodeled our kitchen we had a set of upper kitchen cabinets and we thought what better way to utilize the space than with a little buffet area. In total, we were able to paint and turn our spare cabinets into a modern style buffet for a total of 125 dollars.
With the addition of the buffet, we have new found storage that we now use for extra pint glasses, baking dishes, extra kitchen utensils, anything that really isn’t used often that would go out on our open shelving.
Tools 🔨 needed for the project [For a full breakdown of what we purchased with links/prices, click on this Link to our Project Checklist]:
- Screw Driver
- A mini 3 inch roller
- 2 inch chisel trim paint brush (for cut ins on the all edges) – WE LOVE THIS BRUSH, it’s so ergonomic and easy to hold for longs periods of time
- Sand Paper (mouse sander optional, it will make sanding a lot easier)
- *Paint deglosser (optional if you have a glossy finish on your current cabinets)
- Face Masks (for the dust that gets lifted up during sanding)
- *Polycrylic a clear sealer that adds extra durability (optional if you’re using normal paint and/or want a more durable coat)
- *Wood Glue (we joined two pieces of wood to create our buffet top)
Painting Cabinets Explained:
When painting cabinets we find it easiest to take all cabinet doors off along with the hinges and to put all of the hardware aside. We used our dirty stools to lay out our cabinet doors onto and a painters tarp for painting the cabinets.
After removing the hardware you will want to sand the top surface down a bit. You don’t need to sand all the paint off, the main goal here is to try and sand off the glossy layer or at least rough the surface up a bit to ensure the paint would stick. When sanding we always try to wear a face mask, you just never know what you’re breathing in with those small particles. After sanding you want to make sure you wipe down all the surfaces clean of dust. We like to use a wet towel and finish wiping with a dry towel. The best for picking up small particles are tack cloths, we would use one but often they are easy to forget at the store.
If you don’t want to sand everything down, you can use a deglosser so the paint can adhere even better to the surface. So if you don’t have glossy cabinets then you should be good to skip this step. We used the deglosser linked here and when you use it PLEASE use gloves and even safety glasses for an extra precaution. We took a small cloth towel and poured about a dimes worth of deglosser into the towel then applied it to the cabinet in a circular motion (with pressure). What’s going to happen is the deglosser will get tacky and make the surface of the cabinet sticky and ready for paint. So as you get more familiar with the deglosser you can start to apply more at a time, but the key is to apply it to all areas where you plan on painting. Let that sit for a bit, refer to the instructions and then you can start painting once it’s dried.
As you can see in the picture above and to the right we used a mini 3 inch roller for majority of the surfaces. We also used a 2 inch chisel trim paint brush for any of the corners or areas that the roller couldn’t paint. We ended up up painting our cabinets with chalk board paint. What we like about the black chalkboard paint is the matte finish that it gives. You can use normal paint as well, however it might get dinged up a little easier. If you are looking for a stronger coat of paint, after painting, you can seal it with 4 layers of polycrylic.
Buffet Wood Top Explained:
Additionally, because we were creating our bistro we needed a cheap top to cover our cabinets, so we used this wood board here (just a call out, I would go into the store and look at the pieces of wood and pick your favorite wood grain pattern, because each board is UNIQUE). We also did have the Lowe’s “board cutting” area help us cut the pieces to length which was nice and it saved us a step. We ended up buying two pieces and we used wood glue and clamps to join the pieces together, along with filling the creases with wood filler for a seamless edge.
We chose to join two pieces of 3/4″ inch wood to give us a counter thickness look. You might be able to find thicker wood near you or you can just use a 3/4 inch board, this part is totally up to you obviously and depends on the style that you’re going for.
As you can see in the left pic above, the wood filler sets on purple, but once you smooth it out and give it time to dry it dries clear and you can stain or paint it. After it dried overnight we sanded the boards down with 80, then 120 grit sand paper just to smooth out the top surface, wood filler and the cut edges.
Once you have that complete you can start the stain phase. We are HUGE advocates for wood conditioner aka “pre-stain”. When we use pre-stain we get such a better more consistent color throughout. Here’s a video showing the impact that pre-stain has on the actual stain. The video linked previously does a great job of explaining how to stain so I won’t go into depth here. We used the Minwax English Chestnut stain and applied it lightly, we liked the color but didn’t LOVE it. It came out a lot darker than what the picture on the can looked like. Between this project and writing this post, we have stained other woods (link to our third kitchen remodel – pics of shelving) and the best combo we found was pre-stain, a light coat of Minwax golden oak and then a very little amount of Minwax English Chestnut to darken it up a bit. The last step to make it look a bit more “built in” was to add the trim pieces on the side of the buffet. We removed the trim and then cut really small pieces of trim to fit on each side of the buffet and nailed them into the wall.
The new buffet has been doing us great! We have more storage, it fills the awkward void and is great when we have family over to lay out all of the food buffet style! We also do want to raise it up to match the current kitchen counter height. I think the only other cosmetic change would be re-staining the wood and painting the cabinet to match our kitchen cabinets now (blue/grey-ish color).
Project Completed September 4, 2018