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A Certified TrueColour Expert

April 27, 2016 by Eric Deeter

Getting Color Right

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Brenda has a natural instinct when it comes to color. A friend refers to her as the “Rainman” of color. Her eye for color set us apart from other Kansas City artists back when our main business was faux finishing. And it still gave our clients huge benefits when kitchen cabinet refinishing became the center of our business.

Brenda was always able to make our cabinet refinishing work just the right color to make the counter top, back splash, walls and floor harmonize perfectly.

Now Brenda has upped her game. She recently attended Specify Colour with Confidence True Colour Expert™ Training taught by international color expert Maria Killam. Professional training added to natural instincts is what makes a true professional.

Not your typical cabinet finishers

Many of our clients tell us that other cabinet refinishers merely ask them what they want the final finish to look like. They’re surprised when Brenda takes time to look at all the new colors first. She considers the counter top and backsplash that might be replaced. She looks at the wall color and the floor. Then she makes recommendations for a cabinet finish that will fit with all of them.

You don’t want to make the mistake of picking an off-white that clashes. There are hundreds of off-whites to choose from, and getting just the right undertones for your space is tricky.

Or, if you’re staying with the natural wood grain finish, you don’t want it to clash with the floor.

We get it right

Brenda’s certification as a True Color expert made her even better at getting the right color for your kitchen. She has a new set of tools to make our services even better.

You can also hire her to do a color consultation for the other areas of your home besides the kitchen. Getting you the best colors for your space is what she does.

Why We Don’t Use Lacquer on Kitchen Cabinets

December 17, 2014 by Eric Deeter

Home builders in Kansas City love putting lacquer finishes on custom kitchen cabinets. Lacquer finishes are fast, easy and cheap. A moderately skilled painter can spray lacquer on kitchen cabinets and woodwork and get good-looking finishes. Your new kitchen cabinets sparkle like a jewel. The difference is that a jewel looks good even after 10 years. Your lacquer finished cabinets won’t.

Once your house is ten years old you will notice the kitchen cabinets looking shabby. The original lacquer starts to break down, especially around your sink, stove and coffee maker. Lacquer doesn’t hold up to water and steam. And if you have the yellow oak cabinets so common in the Kansas City area, your yellow cabinets will now be some shade of ugly orange. Any wood with a stained finish will change color with age. The yellow oak changes to orange. The orange color will come even with an oil poly finish. The problem we see is that lacquer finishes also break down after 8 years or so.

Kansas City is full of yellow oak kitchen cabinets. You may have inherited the kitchen cabinets when you bought your home. However it happened, you end up with a worn and dated kitchen.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Refinishing kitchen cabinets is a big deal in Kansas City because so many people want a cost-effective solution to yellow oak cabinets. Some companies decide the best solution is putting more lacquer on your cabinets. Of course, the lacquer industry has come a long way in the past 20 years. Now the trend is to use water-borne lacquer with a catalyst hardener. It comes in colors as well as clear. And it can be tinted dark to let you keep the wood grain yet make your cabinets appear to have a walnut or darker stain.

One of our suppliers started using and selling a water-borne lacquer and raved to us about how well it worked. We decided to test it out. We weren’t impressed. It might stand up better to water better. But the big problem is that it dries brittle.

We’ve just repaired one of these lacquer finishes. It looked great when the painter finished. But it’s chipping off now. And he chipping started less than a year after they paid to have the work done.

Any finish will mar if you hit it hard enough. But lacquer chips too easily. We also saw cracks in the finish at the joints in the doors. Wood expands and contracts depending on the humidity in your home. The Kansas City dry winters always cause kitchen cabinet doors to shrink. The brittle nature of lacquer causes it to break when this happens.

Our process gives better results

We’re willing to look at new products, but we value durability and long-life over ease of use. Companies that use lacquer like it because it’s quick for them, and it looks good when they’re finished. But it might not look so good a few years down the road.

We’re doing more work for a client we helped 8 years ago and their cabinets still look great. You have to remember there is still wood under our finish. It will dent or gouge if you hit it hard enough. But we’ll continue to use tough, durable finishes and do our work by hand. Our products and processes give great looking results that last.

Refinishing a Desk With Our Newest Technique

February 20, 2014 by Eric Deeter

When we refinished Anna’s kitchen cabinets her boys were in middle school and high school. A few years later she asked us to refinish her worn hand rails. Her boys were older now. She pointed out the desk her boys used for their gaming computer. It had the kind of wear and tear boys often create on furniture.

Anna thought it might be good to wait until her boys were a little older before we refinished their desk.

This year her oldest son is in college and she called us to come and refinish the desk. We realized it will still get used as a desk so what we do has to be durable as well as gorgeous.

Brenda spends countless hours researching, studying and testing new refinishing products. She also networks with other finishing artists across the country. Two of these artists have developed products for cabinets that truly shine. Caromal Colours is a specialty paint line for furniture and cabinetry. Pure Earth Pigments is a mineral paint with properties similar to chalk paint.

We discovered a finish using these two products. We named this finish, “Patty’s Hutch.” (We’re more creative with paint than with names.)

Patty’s Hutch finish requires more steps and attention to detail than our average kitchen cabinet finish. And it’s a finish more suited to islands, vanities, desks or furniture than kitchen cabinets. In other words it will work well on accent pieces better than a whole kitchen.

We had a sample of Patty’s Hutch finish in our booth at the home show, and everyone who saw it loved it.

Of course we always make sure the style of whatever finish we put on your kitchen cabinets is going to compliment the decor in your kitchen or any other space we refinish for you. Making your home look good is what we do. And we will continue to stay on the cutting edge of new products and methods so you’ll have the best results possible.

DIY Nightmare Kitchen Cabinet Finish

December 13, 2013 by Eric Deeter

We got a call from a real estate investor who had purchased a bank-owned property. He had plans to renovate it and re-sell it, and he called us to take a look at the kitchen. The previous owners had done a faux finish on the kitchen cabinets and island. It looked as if they were trying to do a “pickled oak” look because they smeared a white glaze over the crevasses to “highlight” them.

But the attempt to create a “faux stone” look on the panels of the island set this kitchen over the top. I don’t recall seeing any kitchen cabinets with real stone panels. The purpose of faux painting is to create something you would find in real life. For example, the artists in ancient Venice created faux marble because the homes built on stilts couldn’t support the weight of real marble. So even if the faux stone had looked real they would have been out of place on this island.

But faux stone is a difficult technique to get right–as you can see from these pictures. Faux stone is more technical than just sponging on several colors of paint. This attempt at stone was just that–paint sponged on. The results were awful.

And the faux stone panels created a challenge for us as well. When we refinish cabinets we usually have the texture of the grain we can work with. But this faux finish filled the grain. Yet the rest of the cabinets still had the grain. Brenda had to find a technique that would work with both the grain texture and the smooth. She settled on a metallic base coat and glaze over the top. this created a soft glow and the glaze she did over the top created the color of wood.

The rest of the cabinets we painted an off-white with a soft glaze over the top. Of course, we finished it off with a clear coat to protect it all. Our work fit well with the other updates the investor put in to this house. It’s now on the market and getting good feedback. I’m sure it will sell soon.

Oh yes. We also had a built-in hutch the previous owners did some sort of faux distressed technique. We did the same finish on the lower ones that we did on the island. And we finished the uppers as we did the main kitchen cabinets.

Kitchen Cabinets and Silicone: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly

September 26, 2013 by Eric Deeter

Silicone is a wonderful adhesive. It stands up to stress and temperature fluctuations. It fills gaps and stays flexible forever. That’s why granite companies use it to hold their slabs in place on your kitchen counters.

But there’s another property to silicone that you need to be aware of–it sticks well to all kinds of stuff, but once it’s dry, nothing sticks to it. Now, there are a lot of places that this is a really good thing, and manufacturers put silicone in a lot of stuff–waterproofing spray, car wax, furniture wax. When you see water beading up on your car, that’s the work of silicone. Silicone mess on kitchen cabinets

But if you’re installing new granite before you hire us to refinish your cabinets, it’s a good idea to make sure the granite installers don’t make a mess like the one pictured here. The non-stick properties of silicone apply to paints and glazes as well. When our glaze, paint or primer hits this stuff it just rolls up in beads, just like the water on your newly-waxed car.

What we have to do in a situation like this one is to scrape off the excess silicone and also scrape the existing finish in hopes that we get it all off. Even with our best attempts at scraping there is often a small piece that still clings to the kitchen cabinet and we discover it too late.

Of course, we work to remove it and touch it up, but often such a touch up will make the final finish not quite as good as it could have been.

We will always try to let you know to watch your granite installers and insist they put masking tape on your kitchen cabinets before they start smearing silicone all over the place. Once the granite is in place and before the silicone is dry, you simply remove the masking tape and you have a crisp thin line of silicone at the very top of your kitchen cabinets, hidden from view.

And when you clean your kitchen cabinets and woodwork, don’t use the spray cleaners that claim to “beautify” wood. They contain silicone. If you ever paint your kitchen cabinets or the woodwork in your house, you’ll have to use powerful chemicals to remove the silicone residue before you can refinish.

It’s best to clean woodwork with dish washing detergent or a mixture of a little white vinegar and water in a spray bottle.