It’s time to tackle the elephant in the room with DIYZ® App

This post is in collaboration with DIYZ. All opinions of apps and companies that help me complete DIY projects are my own.

We needed to do something about our kitchen. It’s not that we’re selling our home; we just need to be ready in case it has to be sold quickly or we wanted to stop cooking in a room that hadn’t been updated since Growing Pains first aired. Combine that with the fact that Mother’s Day is coming up and we had to get going. Do we paint the kitchen cabinets ourselves or  have someone else do it or get all new cabinets? That final choice was far too expensive and hiring someone to paint kitchen cabinets would’ve cost upwards of $3,000. With a little encouragement from DIYZ App we jumped into a relatively simple, but at the same time gargantuan task of painting our kitchen cabinets.

Last year we painted the bathroom kitchen cabinets. It was a somewhat enjoyable task, but the finished job wasn’t perfect and it still took two solid days to complete. Our kitchen has approximately five times the number of doors, not to mention the actual cabinets and it’s the most used room in the house. Once this project starts it can’t stop until it’s completed.

But, it would save us a considerable amount of money and the DIYZ App made it sound realistic. I don’t need pie-in-the-sky optimism when it comes to DIY projects. I need real levels of approachability combined with an accurate view of what skill set they think said project requires. According to the DIYZ App painting your kitchen cabinets is for intermediate level DIY people and would take about five days to complete.

Five days to complete. My head started to spin when I read that. Thankfully before I could second guess myself I started taking off the kitchen cabinet doors, removing hardware and transferring all of the dishes and food.

If your home improvement or patience checked out I hear ya. Almost all of the projects at DIYZ App take less time than this one and are for a variety of skill levels. The app features step-by-step instructions, segmented videos and the option to purchase tools from the curated materials list directly in the app via Amazon. There’s also a feature on the app where you can video to a professional contractor-live, while you’re doing your project. That way if you bit off more than you can chew or simply have a question to get you through this spot just ask. The best part about this feature? Is that it is currently free!

Removing the hardware from the doors and drawers was one of two aspects that our children could assist. It’s worth nothing that DIYZ App has lots of hints along the project way, like taking an example hinge or pull to the store, that way the dimensions, style or color can be matched or taken into consideration.

Once we were simply dealing with the flat surfaces of wood we could come to grips with cleaning it. And by cleaning it, I mean scrubbing the front, back, sides, as well as, any grooves that grease or gunk could accumulate. I’ve discovered that this process is always important, but especially important when you’re doing the kitchen cabinets due to all of the grease, food particles and such that get stuck to your cabinets.

After they dried I could start sanding everything. In the process of using our sanding block I realized that the agitation was producing a smell, a bad smell. It was the train wreck smell of food that shouldn’t go together, but had been ground in-or baked on the grooves in our kitchen cabinet doors.

The rest of the cabinets were easier to sand because of its flat surfaces. This allowed us to use an electric sander which took care of the job much quicker, but did kick up some dust. We sanded both sides of the doors and drawers, as well as the edges, plus the cabinet face. When we sanded the area where the hinges went that smell reared its head again. “That’s how you know it’s working”, I thought to myself. If you need inspiration, just do a quick search for #DIYZ or #GetWise to glean some mojo from fellow DIY people.

Once all of the sanding was finished we could bring out the vacuum cleaners for a thorough cleaning. We vacuumed a safe space (the kitchen table), then each door several times, cabinet faces, interior of the cabinets, kitchen counter, top of refrigerator and finally the floor. Then, when our kitchen was cleaner than it had ever been; we rubbed all of the wood surfaces with a tack cloth, just to get any lingering dust off of the soon to-be-primed area.

To prime the kitchen door and cabinets we used a small roller, in addition to a hand held brush. The hand held brush allowed us to evenly get primer into the grooves of our doors, while the roller let us quickly complete the flat surfaces. In order to prime all of the doors we lined them up in an area where we could paint one side of them in an assembly line fashion.

After I primed the front side of three or four doors I would take the hand held brush and re-visit those already primed doors to check for drips or runs. On almost every door I saw some drips or run and doing this step helped make the final project look great, take the time to do this and it will pay off.

We alternated priming the back, then front for two coats and then moved onto the final color. Again we applied two coats and checked for runs and drops every couple of cabinets.

Tip: Start both the priming and painting process with the cabinet fronts facing down. Paint the backs first. That way, assuming you apply two coats of primer and paint you’ll finish the doors with them face up for the final coat. This was one that we got from the DIZY App, used and it saved us time and money.

We also used cabinet paint. This is the expensive paint that cost approximately $70 a gallon. We’ve never used paint like this before but it makes a huge difference. It dried very fast and left absolutely no brush or roll marks. This is not a paint we’d use for every project, but for this room it was well worth it.

Reattaching the hardware was simple, but did require lots of patience and precision. Unfortunately, the new hardware that we chose had different hole patterns to attach them. We looked in many different places to find the same measurements with the color we wanted that aligned to our existing holes, but no luck. We were aware of this fact going into the project and put wood putty over the old holes prior to painting.

That meant that we had to drill new pilot holes and ensure that the hinges were the distance from the top and bottom of the doors, in addition to making sure that the doors were level. Again, this is something that a DIY person can do, it just takes precision. Measure twice, drill once-and do not drill the pilot hole all the way through the door.

Once all of the doors and drawers were installed we just needed a little touch up paint here and there and we had a brand new kitchen. Our kitchen is slightly larger than the one pictured in the DIYZ App photos. It took us six days to finish the job. Yeah, that’s a lot of time and hours to work on a project, but it did save us thousands of dollars, while accomplishing the same result. My wife often points out that I don’t finish projects all the way. She commented that I completed the project in the same time frame that I told it would. It’s also worth noting that she thought I was crazy for saying that this project could be completed in that time frame, which coincidentally hit just before Mother’s Day…!

One thing that I did discover while scrolling through the various projects on DIYZ App is how approachable most home DIY can be. It’s those little project that you ‘think’ you can do, but the app provides realistic skill sets and work times in order to accomplish that. The feature where you can video chat with a certified expert is priceless. Just imagine you’re installing a ceiling fan and have that one, tiny question. Now you have that person who can be ready on the fly.

The DIYZ app is free to download and is available in the Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Play for Android. And for a limited time, even the video-chat feature is free!