Kitchen Cabinets

While out refrigerator shopping today, the question under discussion was "how do you make it work in our kitchen?"

Now, my house was built in the late 1960s. The solid wood cabinets, brass "bamboo" looking hardware, and white speckled formica are original, although the cabinets were painted white before we bought it. A couple of years ago we had a yellow and white checkerboard linoleum tile floor installed, which I still love. "Not so steampunk", I hear you thinking, and you are right!

So what to do? I've dreamed about steampunk kitchens before -- all marble countertops and custom wood cabinets, sigh. Fundamentally, though, I am too cheap to get custom cabinets made, yet find most of the cabinets on the market today of an inferior quality to the solid wood ones that are currently in the house.

The best option I've come up with is to paint the existing cabinets. We happened to drop by some friends' today, and they were having their kitchen cabinets painted for around $500 (plus materials). This seems quite economical to me, and we wouldn't even have to do it ourselves.

The color I was thinking of was black. I'm a bit color shy, and black is definitely dramatic, so I went looking for some pictures of other's black cabinets to see how it might look. Here's what I found:



Nice, huh? I think the trick to keeping this looking good is the light colored countertops, walls and floor.



Probably more like what my cabinets would look like... not horrible, but not great. I think the key would be to stay away from a high gloss paint. (But maybe not???)



I found the above at a designer's site, and Ben loved it. Instead of going for light colored countertops, the designer opted for black countertops and light colored doors. An interesting idea, for sure.

In addition to just painting the cabinets, I thought that a painted/stenciled "frame" around each door might be nice. (The doors are entirely flat.) One possible design:



If we painted the cabinets black, I think I'd do this is a warm metallic -- aged brass, bronze, gold, copper -- to match the hardware.

To get something like the last kitchen picture above, we could paint the cabinet frames black, and then stencil the doors in brown or black on an antiqued background. (Ralph Lauren Paint has 4 different aging tints; wonder if that would work over our existing white paint?) Black formica or Corian countertops would complete the look, without blowing the budget.

I'd love feedback on this idea -- are black cabinets crazy? What about two tone ones? How hard is stenciling? Aging?

Bonus: This Old House has an article on painting kitchen cabinets.