Master Bath take two

Way back 2 years ago before this blog was even a twinkle in my eye I made a rash decision one weekend while my husband was out of town. I wanted to darken our maple wood master bath cabinets. I had no clue exactly how to do this but we had a can of espresso stain leftover from Little Mans refinished bookshelf. And really how hard could it be?

Well, my novice (read lazy) self did not sand, prime, or anything! I did manage to remove all of the doors and drawers though! 2 coats in I realized something wasn't quite right but what was I going to do then? I moved forward and let everything dry. It looked okay... So I put all of. The hardware back on and hung the cabinets and put the drawers back in. And then I did something really dumb... There were several places that needed touch up so I grabbed the can and painted away. It did look a little off but it was wet so I crossed my fingers and came back to see how it dried. Ummm... It was awful! Apparently, I had grabbed the darker color stain so now I had a streaky stained mess for cabinets.

So the week before vacation I decided to retackle this project. But this time I wanted to do it right!

So the cabinet doors and drawers all came off again. This time they got taken down to the garage and got sanded down using an electric sander (thanks to my wonderful husband for doing this!) You can see the original color maple on the inside and also the scratches and mismatched color in this shot below!

Then I taped off the cabinet base in the bathroom (I also popped off the pencil molding at the bottom in favor of something a little nicer).

About mid-way thru sanding one of the cabinet doors. Kind of a cool worn look!

Then a coat of primer.

Then two coats of paint. We color matched Martha Stewart Cracked Pepper in Behr Premium Semi Gloss and it's a great navy, black, charcoal color.

An overnight dry. And voila!!! More pics to come - everything is showing the color as more blue than it is so need to wait for some more natural light!