New Products and Techniques

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.

Experimenting With a New Cabinet Refinishing Technique

March 23, 2014 by Eric Deeter

It’s a small picture. Just a corner of a magazine page. Our client likes the look of the cabinet pictured here.

Brenda went to work. The colours needed to be tweaked to fit the palette in the rest of the kitchen. It appeared we might be able to use our overglaze process with the right shades to get this effect. But after several attempts Brenda knew she had to try a different approach.

We Almost Never Use Oil Products

I have to add the “almost” here. It’s very rare that we use any oil products. We like the low odour and easy clean up of water-based products.

We are adamant in our belief that oil-based gel stains are not a good solution to overglaze the Golden Oak cabinet finishes so common here in Kansas City. Gel stain, like all oil-base stains, is intended to soak in to unfinished wood. There are no binders in oil-base stains. When you stain your lacquer finished cabinets you run the risk of adhesion problems. Believe me, you don’t want to find out a year from now that your new finish comes off with a minor scrape.

Stain Over Paint

There’s a big difference, however, when you use oil stain over paint. As long as you do the prep work needed, paint will stick. And even the best paint is porous. You may have discovered this fact by accidentally spilling something like wine on a painted surface.

Chalk paint has the wonderful properties of sticking like crazy to whatever you paint and being porous. Brenda thought it was worth a try. Chalk paint comes in standard colours. So Brenda started mixing a little of this with some of that to get the grey she needed.

Success

She left it to dry overnight and then went to work with gel stain and Turpentine. She was pleased with the results. The combination of chalk paint and oil, gel-stain gave her the ability to move the colour around in ways a water-based glaze would not allow. The stain will adhere well to the chalk paint. We’ll have the option to finish it with either wax or our go-to water-base topcoat. Either way, this finish will be as durable as it is beautiful.

Of course we will add this to all of the other choices we offer to refinish kitchen cabinets in the Kansas City area. There are still a lot of Golden Oak kitchens out there.

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.

Product Changes Keep Us Scrambling

November 30, 2012 by Eric Deeter

Kansas City has fared better in this down economy than other places. But that doesn’t mean we’re unaffected by what happens nationally. The downturn in the economy has affected us all. A lot of faux finish artists have gone out of business. And companies that sold us products have gone by the wayside.

So one of our challenges as faux finish artists is to stay on top of all the changes in our industry. Some of the products we used to love and use regularly are no longer available. And our most recent challenge is in the paint we buy. “Paint & primer” in one is the new marketing strategy some paint companies are using. I think it is a ploy to hide the fact that they’ve changed the formula and the paint doesn’t work like it used to.

Now if you are just painting walls, the new paint will cover and give you the color you want. But for us as faux finish artists, the paint is just the first step. It’s the canvas we use to work on. And when the paint companies reformulate we know it immediately. So the brand we’ve used for years and used to swear by is now causing us to have to modify our techniques and add other products to make it work like it used to.

One of the problems paint companies are facing is the rising price of titanium dioxide: the stuff that makes the paint color cover what’s underneath. Here is a chart showing the price of titanium dioxide over the last few years.

As a result of the increase in price, companies are switching to white clay. Clay is absorbent. So when we put glaze on top of it, it acts like a sponge and sucks it into the paint.

The first time this happened to us we were able to adapt–that’s what artists do–and still get the look we were after. But in order to achieve the end results, we had to work a whole lot harder.

So we are on the hunt for a paint that will allow us to give us the results we’re after without a frantic scramble to “fix” the paint that doesn’t work like it used to.

We’ve heard rumors the Behr may go back to the original formula because they’ve had complaints. They will probably do what Coca Cola did and keep the new and roll out “classic”.

No matter what, we’ll keep adapting and searching for the highest quality products to give our clients great results.

Faux Finish – Making New Look Old – Phase 2

March 2, 2012 by Eric Deeter

Again we made the trek from Kansas City to Bethany to do Phase 2 of our faux finish on the private saloon. The new cedar beams were impressive because of their size, but they looked new–because they were. Our task was to age and distress them. Brenda had several ideas, including using vinegar that had steel wool dissolved in it. In the end we used regular faux finish techniques–tools to distress the wood and glazes to age it.

The other part of this phase was to work on the “outhouse” floor. In the other corner of the barn, opposite the saloon, is the bathroom. It’s designed to resemble an old stone outhouse. The wash basin will be an old wash tub on a stand. I haven’t seen what the toilet will be, but I’m going to guess that it will look old as well. Our clients wanted something different than plain concrete. Brenda used an overlay technique to make it look like limestone.

I think the clients like it because they’ve decided on us doing the same treatment on the main floor of the saloon. We will be going back for Phase 3 & 4 before this project is finished.

Making New Construction Look Old – Private Saloon in Bethany, MO

January 19, 2012 by Eric Deeter

A designer called us in to help with a project in Bethany, MO–about an hour & a half north of Kansas City. Our clients rebuilt a large barn that had burned down. The rebuilt it the same size, but added modern upgrades such as a heated concrete floor.

In one corner of the barn they are dedicating a 24′ x 30′ room to be their own private saloon. They found a bar from an old saloon in Wyoming and are designing their space using it as the inspiration.

Our part in the process is to take the new tin ceiling

and make it look rusted.

Our client told us that the tin ceiling is not a reproduction. The company is located in Missouri and has never gone out of business. They are still manufacturing the same ceilings they did a century ago.

We had to spray the tin with a clear sealer. The manufacturer says that the metal has to be coated with either a clear sealer or primed and painted–to keep it from rusting. We did think it kind of ironic that our first step was to keep it from rusting before we did a faux rust finish. We used clear shellac for our sealer. It’s less of a hassle for cleanup and we knew it would yellow less than an oil-base sealer.

The clients love the results. Here’s a short video of the work so far.

We are going to plaster the walls and perhaps distress some mirrors for this project. More updates to come.