When we first bought our house I immediately knew I wanted to paint our kitchen cabinets white. I am pretty HUGELY fond of white cabinets in kitchens. And definitely NOT a fan of dark wood cabinets. This is what we had when we first moved in...

Dark. Out dated. Dirty. Gloomy.

But the question was... how would we go about transforming these dark gloomy cabinets into the bright cheery white cabinets I've always wanted? We basically had two options - sand them all down, choose our own white paint and make sure we Kilz the dickens out of these things before painting OR use the highly acclaimed Rustoleum method. The whole thing with Rustoleum is that everything you need is sold in one kit and you use a "de-glosser" solution to strip the old stain off of the wood instead of having to sand down the wood. It is supposed to be less work and less mess. I did a little research and it seemed like it would be the best choice. Lucky for us a lady from our church had just used the Rustoleum to do her and her mother's kitchen cabinets and loved the way they turned out, so that helped persuade us to use the kit. The only thing I was worried about was that they didn't exactly have a WHITE white color if we followed all of the steps. You see there is this second to last step called the "decorative glaze" that gives the cabinets a wood grain look. Its not that I don't like that look, its just that I wanted a white washed look and if I applied the glaze, then by the examples on the companies website, my white would turn into a cream sort of color. Not what I wanted. But I was assured that we could just skip that step and keep the white washed look so we decided that would be our plan.

So Step 1: We made a diagram sketch of our cabinets and numbered the doors, laying them out on our little paint station in order so we would be able to put them back in the right spot. We ended up buying new hinges for all of the cabinets so we just tossed the old ones. We kept all of the door handles.
Step 2: We got our de-glosser solution and used the scrubbing pads that the kit provided to scrub down all of the doors and the cabinet frames. This was actually a lot more work than I anticipated. It's supposed to be easier than sanding, but I found it just as labor intensive. The ONLY thing that made this better than sanding was that there was less mess. We did have to dry/wipe down everything, but it wasn't as bad as trying to vacuum up dust.
Step 3: Apply the "Bond Coat". This is the color part. We chose to go with Pure White. I mean, you can't get any more white than Pure White right? They say this part is only supposed to take 2 coats. We definitely had to put at least 3 coats, even 4 coats on some of the doors, but luckily we had plenty of paint in the can from the kit.

These are our cabinet frames after the first coat. I was starting to get excited!!! The kit doesn't come with enough paint to pain the INSIDE of the cabinets but we ended up using some white paint that we had had for our trim to put a couple of coats on the inside for a cleaner look when you open the cabinets.

After we felt that our cabinets were white enough, no streaking or dark wood peaking through in places, we came to Step 4. This was the decorative glaze part that we decided to skip. So on to...

Our cabinets drying in the garage after the protective top coat had been applied. We used saw horses and 2x4's, plus a few cardboard boxes to create our paint station.

After the top coat dried it was time to hang up our newly restored kitchen cabinets!!!

Bright. Updated. Clean. Cheery.