First Steps to Reface Your Kitchen Cabinets
After ordering your material to reface your current cabinets you will most likely have to wait a couple weeks before it arrives. Once all of the materials arrive you will want to take a moment and look through everything. Make sure that you take everything out of the box, lay it out, and examine the products. You will want to look for any damage that happened during the shipping process. Make sure that you are satisfied with the appearance of every piece. If there is any type of damage, you will want to notify the delivery service immediately.
When you decide it is time to start refacing your cabinets, you should always start with the end panels. Where these end panels are located are quite obvious. You will find that the end panel is the exposed panel at the end of a cabinet. You might have bought some type of a veneer to cover up these ends. Some people prefer to cover these up, while others prefer to create a panel that can be installed here. You can order panels that can fit at the end of a run of cabinets. If you have not yet ordered your material and do not know what type of end panel you would like, you can conduct a Google Images search and see the different cabinet structures.
If you decide to use a plywood panel instead of adhesive to reface the end panels, you will need to measure the panel and then cut it to the appropriate size. Keep in mind that this edge will not look complete until you reface the rest of the cabinet that is parallel to the end panel.
After refacing the end panels, you should then move onto the cabinet boxes. You will need to first sand the existing cabinet boxes. Once you sand the box so it is smooth and ‘fresh,’ you will then apply the appropriate veneer. However, you need to make sure that all of the dirt is completely cleaned off of the cabinet first. You can cut the veneer to fit the size of the cabinet box. Once you cut the piece (a bit longer than the actual length of the cabinet box), you can start to apply adhesive paper to the back. You will want to make sure you go slow; the adhesive is very sticky and it is hard to re-due the initial adhesive process.