My kitchen with no cabinets :
After this was done I spent another hour or so washing all the cabinets down with TSP. My goal was to degrease. The cabinets had had those little rubber stoppers on the inside of cabinets (to prevent the doors banging) and there was a lot of glue residue. The TSP really helped get rid of that.
Tuesday - I spent about 3 hours sanding down all the cabinets. I had an electric sander with 150 grit paper. I had never used a power sander and didn't really know much about sanding. But I would say I spent about 10 minutes per cabinet and focused on the areas were hinges and handles had been the most but tried to sand all over. This was not really a job I enjoyed.
That evening we had some help and my mother and a friend filled all the holes with putty. Sanded. Then puttied again. Then sanded again. They spent a few hours on this. When they were done, all holes felt smooth to the touch.
Here is an example of how it looked :
On Wednesday we set up the the house to paint on Thursday. We set the sanded cabinets up on sawhorses in two rooms of the house. Not pictured, we ended up putting some packing foam beneath the cabinets that later then we had to flip them, they went onto something soft.
Now we were ready for the big day - painting.
