Refinishing Our Kitchen Cabinets - Day 2

Day 2 has us already well under way with the new project. The initial set of cabinets has been stripped, cleaned with mineral spirits, and sanded at this point. (We are doing the doors in stages for lack of space. Even though we can do a bunch at once in the courtyard, turns out that I don't want tons of tiny bug corpses stuck to my new stain. Lesson learned.)

This cabinet is prepped and ready for the next step!


This is the new stain color for the cabinets. Minwax Red Mahogany 225 oil-based stain. This is the first coat. It's rich, lovely, beautiful, and exactly what we want!!


After the cabinet is stained and we wait for five minutes, we pull off the excess stain with a clean rag and make sure that the stain has been applied evenly. It is pretty easy and fun, though messy, and we have gone through a lot of rags. Which is good, because we had a lot of rags and we prefer to get rid of things in a functional use as opposed to hold onto things as pack rats. Our intention is to reduce where possible, and find uses for everything else. We are currently working through years of accumulated fancy bath soaps, lotions, loofahs (I had a strangely large supply of these), spices, ingredients, supplements, etc. Less is more, especially when something that we no longer want can be re-purposed to be useful.