Kitchen Makeover
As a way to envision a project before it starts I like to create Photoshop pre-visualizations. You can hover over the image below to see a mock-up showing what I envisioned doing with the kitchen cabinets. I made several versions, trying different colors and shades until I felt I had the perfect one.
Photoshop Previs
In order to even better visualize what a room will look like after renovation I invented a technique (at least I have not seen anyone else doing it) where I create a previs on a 360 panoramic VR sphere. With a VR viewer like Google Cardboard you can have an immersive experience where you can turn around and look at the previs room from every direction. One of the problems with VR is finding useful applications so it's a tool rather than a gimmick. Doing 360 previs of home remodeling seems like the perfect use, so I'm just saying: Hey world, I thought of it first!
While it's not immersive to view a 360 VR image on the web, you can nevertheless use the controls on the image below to spin it around and see it from different perspectives. As a bonus, see if you can find our kids being goofballs in the kitchen.
To paint cabinets you need to remove the doors and drawers to paint them. We also replaced all the handles with nice modern ones, so I had to fill the old holes and drill new ones. I also needed to prep the surfaces before painting, cleaning and sanding them so they would take the paint well.
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The hardest part was that it took days to dry. So we set aside space in the garage where we would lay out a batch of doors, and let them dry for at least 72-hours, then put them back, and take down a new batch, repeating this process in cycles.
To paint the cabinet frames, which we obviously could not remove, we taped off things, and used special cabinet paint rollers to get the large areas and nice brushes to get the narrow areas.
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Below you can see the final result. It's amazing what a difference it makes. The feel of the room is completely transformed. Really the main ingredient was simply patience, because waiting for that paint to dry is like... well, it's like waiting for paint to dry.
