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Kansas City Kitchen Cabinet Restyling and Refinishing.

Love Your Kitchen Again

913-441-5508

Miscelaneous

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.

Filed Under: Featured, Miscelaneous

Getting Bids: A View From the Other Side of the Fence

December 13, 2011 by Eric Deeter

When people ask us to give them a bid we sometimes correct them and say that we call it a “proposal”.  The idea of “bidding” feels like one of those cheesy TV shows like “The Bachelor” where women compete to be chosen for a marriage proposal.  Usually people getting bids look for the lowest price first & foremost.  So we usually respond that we won’t be the lowest in price for faux finishing their home.  But if someone is looking for value for their money, we can give them plenty of reasons why we should do the job.

We have seen some of the nightmares people have gone through because they chose the lowest price bid.  We’ve had to go in a fix some of those jobs too.  The job then ends up costing more because we have to undo the mistakes of the low bid faux finish & then start fresh and do the job right.

And now we are on the other side of the fence as we rehab our new place in Kansas City.  We are almost ready to hang the sheetrock.  We’re not going to do it ourselves this time, so we’re talking to drywall contractors.  We are also working with a tight budget, so price is important.  We’ve received 2 proposals and are waiting on 2 more.  The second proposal we received was double the cost of the first.  This would have been a concern for us, but the lower proposal came from a referral.  The second proposal came from a social media contact–one step above picking a name out of the Yellow Pages.

I asked questions about the lower priced contractor  from my referral source.  What quality of work do they do?  Do they work quickly?  Are they messy?  The higher priced contractor didn’t have that kind of referral, but then again, he didn’t try to sell me on his value either.  In fact, some of the things he said about the job put Brenda off even before we knew the price.  We weren’t likely to use him even if he had the lower proposal.

The two other contractors we’re talking to are also from referrals.  We shall see where they come in on the price vs. value scale.  We will make our decision the way that we ask our clients to decide if we can create a faux finish for them–who will give us quality workmanship and get the job done with the least amount of hassle for us and with the least amount of mess in our home?

Filed Under: Miscelaneous Tagged With: Renovation

We’ve Moved to Kansas City

November 11, 2011 by Eric Deeter

Picture of a moving truck should be here

We’ve moved.  We didn’t leave the Kansas City metro, but we moved from Shawnee to Kansas City, KS.  Since MorningStar Faux Finish Studio is a home-based business, we doubled our work in the process.  We faced a lot of difficulties along the way and emotional ups and downs.  If you ask, we’ll tell you the story sometime.

We bought a bank-owned house just north of the Legends in Wyandotte county.  The neighborhood is 20 years old and many of the original owners still live here.  The house was full of mold and needed a lot of work.  Brenda used her unique vision for renovation and design to plan some extensive changes.  We filled a 30-yard dumpster just to get rid of the mold.

From Rehab

There are a lot of faux finish artists in the Kansas City metro who don’t truly understand the emotional stress that their clients go through by having their living space renovated.  Change is hard.  And having your living space out of whack isn’t easy.  But we aren’t like those folks.  We’ve lived through extensive renovations before & we’re doing it again.  We won’t have a kitchen here for a couple more months.

Our kitchen
From Rehab


Brenda has a temporary studio in what will be the family room.  We are able to still serve our clients and give good quality service and workmanship.  We just have a project of our own.

Filed Under: Miscelaneous Tagged With: Personal stories, Renovation

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