Projects

It has been really fun to be home with the baby.  I've really enjoyed her.  You can tell from looking at my house, that I enjoy her since not much else is really getting done. 
But, since school is back in I have been trying to get some things organized and finished. 

If you stop by my house on any given day, it will probably look like a cyclone hit it.  First of all because I still just hang out with the baby a lot, and I play a lot with Dallin.  But also, because I am pulling out closets and re-organizing them.  Slowly but surely we are getting there.  Check out my desk:

We have enough projects, big and little, to last a long long time.  One that we are particularly anxious to get done is redoing our kitchen cabinets. 

I have read a bunch of tutorials online.  There were two possibilities for what we could do.  Option 1, paint them white.  Option 2, stain them.  Both looked promising. 

I decided to try stain.  I used my downstairs bathroom to experiment on.  That way, if I hated it, it was only the little bathroom.  Here is what it started out as:

Blah, boring honey oak colored cabinets.  So I sanded them as the tutorials say to do. 

Then applied the stain.  At this point, I loved it!  Pretty! 

Encouraged, I kept going.  Then I started to have some trouble.  Anytime you refinish wood cabinets, it is really hard to get all of the varnish off.  Since wood has a surface that is not perfectly smooth, sanding really only removes it from the high spots.  Varnish remains in the low spots.  Where the sander removes more varnish, it accepts more stain.  There really isn't an anyway around this. 

 

So I ended up with a blotchy surface.  And oddly enough, one coat on the top drawer was way darker than 2 coats on the middle one.  Weird.  But I am no expert. 

 

I kept going.  And redid the whole thing.  Here is the finished product:

 

It is not amazing, and you can tell this was not done by a professional.  But I do like it better than what was originally there.  Especially since these cabinets do not get seen a whole lot.  So I would do it again.  I think I would have been better off not sanding at all, since the stain will go on over the varnish and I could have avoided the blotchiness.  I was trying to follow directions.  Silly me.  Anyway, I am not going to use the stain on our kitchen cabinets.  So that means they will get painted white.  That will be a project!