Hi,

My kitchen cabinet is wood, and in good shape, but I don't like the color. Is it possible to stain to Cherry color? I attached my cabit picture, and I want to stain to this color
[URL=http://www.hgtvremodels.com/kitchens/kitchen-cabinet-buying-guide/index.html]
is it possible?

Thanks a lot!

Sure, you can do it, but it's a lot of work.

Unlike paint, stain actually penetrates right into the wood cells. So, to restain the wood a different colour, it's necessary to remove the stained wood on the surface of your wood. This is normally done by sanding. Furniture refinishers will sometimes try bleaching out the stain by dissolving swimming pool chlorination crystals in water to make a strong bleach in the hopes of bleaching the wood. The problem is that this method is unreliable and unpredictable. The resulting bleached wood is often unattractive and has to be sanded off anyway.

And, of course, in order to sand the existing stained wood off, you need to strip the varnish or polyurethane off your cabinets first, typically with paint stripper, and that's a messy job.

Once you strip the varnish or polyurethane off of everything, and then sand everything down to the virgin wood, then you can restain the cabinets a different colour and add another clear coat.

But, be aware that to get really nice looking cabinets, you're going to have to spray the clear coat on, and it takes a lot of skill to do a good job with a spray gun. You can take the doors off the cabinets and take them somewhere to be sprayed, but you can't do that with the cabinets themselves.

A short cut you might want to consider would be to refinish only the cabinet doors to the colour you want.

But, the fastest and easiest route to go would be to learn to love the colour of the cabinets you have.

we've gone from nasty dark stain to a nice warm golden oak. morning sun makes the kitchen glow like Disney light.

lot of sanding. we cut through veneer to scuzwood a few times on the ends of cabinets and had to glue on new oak veneer.

LOT of work getting the insides painted, the outsides stained and varnished. some sanding and re-varnishing was needed to fix sags here and there.

but it's nice.

we tossed the scuzwood doors and drawer fronts and made new ones with oak. probably cost us $30 each, but buying new rail and stile doors was about $100 each at the home center. with 39 doors and 27 or so drawer fronts, that ain't happening.

oh, yes, the kitchen the two of us redid took about a year to finish, A to Z. had to learn a lot to do it, and if you try this, I recommend using cheap wood to make "proof of concept" countertops and doors, etc.

wreck 2 or 4 or 10 using junk and perfect your technique cheaply.

If you are changing your kitchen looking and create a new look for your kitchen to refresh your kitchen cabinets...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: garmon123,