September Book-of-the-Month: The Painted Kitchen by Henny Donovan

These?past?few days have?been a blur of?birthdays, a cool commission, ten-year wedding anniversaries (mine – woohoo!) and a whole lotta incoming info on blogs.? Phew!? This coming weekend has my brother teaching his awesome cabinetry class.? Last month, he had students flying in to take the workshop…pretty cool!? Most cabinet courses focus on teaching different finishes but my brother’s class is a bit different.? We deduced our top two most requested finishes: (1) Distressed and (2) Elegantly Aged — and turned each one into a?full-day class.? The focus is on?proper prepwork, how to dismantle/organize doors?and hardware, how to use an HVLP sprayer (this gives a beautiful factory finish) and what are the best products for?your substrate.? Interested?? Check out the schedule here.? So, shameless plug aside, cabinets are fast becoming one of the most popular areas we are asked to work with.? There are a few books out on the subject, but one I really like is The Painted Kitchen by Henny Donovan.? It has a lot of cool finish ideas and loads of pics.

The book goes into turning flat doors into paneled doors, working with metallics,?matching door styles with paint effects?and has a nice list of preparation requirements for many surfaces you may encounter.

Finishes are catalogued?by color and although only some of the finishes get a step-by-step breakdown, each picture in the book has a description on achieving?the finish.? (Love the?gold leaf one at the bottom since it reminds me of the first pic in our December book recommendation).

I hope you like the pics enough to pic up the book.? For a DIYer, it’s?great?because it has so much info on achieving the looks and for the professional, it’s wonderful because it gives a lot of inspirational ideas as well as overviews on each finish.? We’ll “talk” soon!