Home & Interior Design books:
The Painted Kitchen: Over 60 quick and easy ways to transform your kitchen cupboards

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In The Painted Kitchen, Henny Donovan demonstrates how with some paint and basic tools anyone can transform a drab, dated kitchen to the most welcoming room in the house. Add new doorknobs, maybe some gold leaf or colored wax for embellishment, and the heart of the home is once again stylish and a pleasure to use.

Organized by color -- naturals and off-whites, yellows, reds, blues, greens, black and gray -- and complete with comprehensive step-by-step instructions and photographs, The Painted Kitchen offers the principles of color, choosing color, and working with man-made finishes. Full of inspiration and eminently practical, this book shows how to:

• prepare old or damaged natural and manmade surfaces for painting
• work with laminates, raw and painted wood, melamine, and fiberboard
• choose colors that work with the room's lighting
• co-ordinating colors to create ambience
• choose the right faux finish for your cupboards
• create the most popular faux effects: colorwashing, distressing, glazing, dragging, combing, stippling, sponging, rag-rolling, spattering, craquelure, crackle glazing, relief stenciling, textured combing, stamping, and decoupage
• use luxurious embellishments: gold leaf, colored waxes, metallic paints, molding and polishing
• work with exciting products: venetian plaster, texture paints, liming wax, graphite varnish.
• mix universal tints

More than 16 innovative projects, each with four variations, offer choices for everyone, including:

• blue-and-white Portuguese-style folk art
• vinegar-glaze fingerprinting
• birch wood graining with faux ebony and ivory inlay
• terra cotta polished plaster with copper squares
• liming over a marquetry-style woodwash
• vine-leaf stipple, gingham checks, duck-egg speckle
• distressed paintwork and hand-painted script.

An extensive list of North American sources rounds out this excellent how-to reference.

Excellent! -
I really liked this book. The ideas were original and creative and I hadn't seen them in other books of the same genre. The step by step instructions were good although the finish I chose required a lot of special tools that I had to purchase. It would be nice if there had been an indication of cost for the various ideas, although once I picked my favorite, it wouldn't have mattered.

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Great Kitchen Cabinet Ideas -
This is a good book that provides lots of ideas on ways to paint your kitchen cabinets. The first chapter discusses preparing the surface and things like matching door styles with the paint effect you want. The rest of the chapters are divided by colors. Of course, any of the techniques could be used with alternate colors.

One of the chapters includes a step-by-step description, with photographs, that show how to turn flat doors into paneled doors. Some of the instructions are incomplete and appear to assume some knowledge. For example, "make sure the rectangle is aligned "square" to the door", even a brief description of how to make sure it's square might be helpful to some readers.

I liked this book because there were some very inventive ideas for decorating doors including decoupage, hand-painted script, combing and relief impasto stenciling (using impasto, a thick textue paint that produces a raised finish). Even though some of the steps don't include all the details needed if you are a beginner, I think for the most part you would be able to complete the projects by using both the text and photographs.

The Good, Bad & Not-So Ugly -
It wasn't what I was expecting but maybe what I want doesn't exist. With that explanation out of the way - I must say it's really one of the better kitchen cabinet idea books out there. It has great photos, a large quantity of ideas and is very informative about various products, equipment and necessary prepartion. It's chapters are broken down by color which makes it easy to skim through the book and find what you're interested in without having to read every chapter to learn what you need to know. The "bad" part is that the technique directions are sometimes not too specific or clear so it's best to just use the book for ideas and refer to a book on painting techniques for more explicit directions if you're very dependent on step by step directions. Other than that, I'd really recommend this book to anyone who is looking for cabinet update ideas without the expense of buying all new ones.

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