Roxy Home Living's DIY Kitchen Desk Makeover

Award winning Roxy Home Living, grew a passion for home renovations in 2007. As a former owner of Elegantly Stated Home Staging, Roxy has an eye for design and has won many inspiring awards for staging homes in real estate. The more her passion grew, the more she wanted to share it with the world. That is when she started Roxy Home Living as a blogger and social media influencer to inspire others through all of her design knowledge and experience she has gained through her journey!

Choosing to work with Roxy was a no brainer after seeing her impressive work. We found the perfect opportunity when she was looking to update her kitchen desk area into an elegant built-in buffet style tableside.

Originally she had planned to hire a contractor to do her kitchen renovation, but quickly realized a complete remodel comes with not only the inconvenience of the kitchen being unusable during construction, but also a hefty price tag! With her experience and creativity, she knew she could DIY her kitchen renovation to make it budget friendly. Her cabinet boxes were in good condition so she decided refacing her cabinet doors and drawer fronts plus painting her cabinets would be a great idea!

The Step By Step Process

This is the photo of what the desk area looked like when she first bought her home. She knew that she wanted to design the new kitchen desk area unique to her and the rest of the kitchen to look more like a buffet so these are the steps she took to visualize her dream kitchen into reality.

STEPS INVOLVED IN REPLACING KITCHEN CABINET DOORS AND DRAWER FRONTS:

1. Decide on the new style of cabinetry you want. She already had raised panel kitchen cabinet doors, so she knew adding shaker style doors and drawer fronts to the new buffet would instantly set it apart from the kitchen.

2. Measure for new cabinet doors and drawer fronts. Having doors already in that space made measuring easy, but when unsure, the general rule of thumb is that front face cabinet doors should be installed with a half inch overlay around the frame. See CabinetNow's measuring guide.

3. Place your order and if you’re not able to router the doors for hinges, order your doors pre-bored.

“Make sure you are working with a company that is helpful in your ordering process and values the importance of customer service. Trust me, you will have questions along the way and you’ll want a company that has a human aspect behind the eCommerce experience that will continue to work with you after the initial ordering process. For my kitchen makeover project I worked with 2 cabinet companies and a local contractor for cabinetry in various areas of the kitchen. As a result, I experienced first-hand that CabinetNow was able to provide quality products and the level of customer service that I needed (and appreciate) when tackling a project.”

4. Remove the old cabinet doors.

5. Sand cabinet boxes. She used 150 grit sandpaper to partially remove the stain from her cabinet boxes and smoothed it with 220 grit prior to priming.

6. Use Bondo to fill holes from the existing hinges (your new cabinet door hinges may not align with the existing holes and it’s best to start from scratch).

7. Tape off pre-bored and dowel holes to avoid paint build-up.

8. Paint the cabinet boxes and new doors and drawer fronts. Her go-to primer is Zinsser primer and her favorite cabinet paint is Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel by Sherwin Williams in Ultra White Satin Finish. She applied 1 coat of primer and 2-3 coats of paint, sanding in between each coat with 220 grit to remove any flaws and/or rough up the paint so that the new coat of paint has something to adhere to.

9. Measure where the hinges will be screwed into the existing cabinets and pre-drill holes. She used a pencil to mark the boxes a half inch below face frame opening to align the bottom half of the new cabinet doors and drawer fronts. She then later cleaned the pencil marks with Magic Eraser sheets. 

10. Install hinges on the new doors. She decided to change her existing hinges and add a soft close hinge to her doors.

11. She added these beautiful mullions to her glass front cabinet doors to give them that extra “wow” effect!

12. Attach the doors to the cabinet box.

13. Use a screwdriver to adjust cabinet hinges to make sure everything is hanging evenly.

14. Drill holes for handles. She always uses blue painter's tape to cover the entrance and the exit of the drill bit to prevent the wood from splitting.

15. Screw in new cabinet hardware.

16. Light fixture was provided by Kichler. 

“A Beautiful Result Is Worth Every Bit Of Hard Work”

Roxy concludes her project journey by sharing some useful advantages of replacing cabinet doors VS a full kitchen renovation:

• Saves money
• Causes less upheaval
• Kitchen can be completed in less time

If you are ready to start your kitchen renovation please feel free to contact us!