Anyone familiar with Kitchenmaid stains?

I am purchasing a Kitchenmaid cabinet (yeah, I know, I'm supposed to make my own). It as moss green glaze on bead board. I am running about another 40' of bead board and want to match it to the cabinet. Kitchemaid sells 4x8 sheets of glazed beadboard for about $350 each! HD carries 4x8 beadboard for $20 each and has a 5 mm veneer of birch, supposedly unfinished. Since the purchased cabinet is also birch, I should have a good chance of matching the cabinet color on the HD beadboard by buying a glaze "kit" from Kitchenmaid. I guess it is a 2 or 3 step process and costs about $120 per quart of stain and glaze.

I'm leaning towards giving it a try (buy HD birch beadboard and stain/glaze it) rather than spending over $1000 on 3 4x8 glazed panels.

Any experiences with this stuff?

Thanks, dwhite

Reply to
Dan White
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On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 22:21:46 -0500, "Dan White" vaguely proposed a theory ......and in reply I say!:

remove ns from my header address to reply via email

Maybe, but will they admit to it? (snicker)

oh.... sorry. You're not OT. Woodworking stuff....sorry

Reply to
Old Nick

Dan,

Last year I made raised panel cabinet and drawer fronts for my sister-in-law copied from the Kitchenaid ones you mentioned and in the same green moss color. When it came to finishing the fronts, I called Kitchenaid and tried to purchase the stain they used. No good, they would not sell it. Seems all their finishing is outsourced and the stain is proprietary to that company.

Tried a number of attempts at making our own stain but never could get the color just right and Kitchenaid would not give any clues as to what basecoats were used and they didn't offer any glazing kits at the time. After a lot of wasted effort, I went to Lowes, took the sample display panel from the Kitchenaid display up to the paint dept and asked them to match it with a quality, latex paint. In about 10 minutes, we had a perfect match in gloss and color and it was perfect. We painted some on the back of the display door and after it dried, you could not see the difference.

We primed everything and then applied two coats by brush and they came out looking great. There were two versions of that moss green color scheme. One being a everything moss green and the other having some worn / rubbed / antique look to parts of the doors. I did a set of doors so they would look like the ones on the Kitchenaid display as examples for my SIL and I came pretty close. Door was primed using a white based primer to which I added a smidgen of the moss green paint to tint it ever so slightly. The whole door was primed and allowed to dry.

Next, in selected areas like the door edges (high wear areas) and near the pull handle, I applied some burnt-umber artists paints (acrylic) by just ragging and wiping an area like the door edge. After everything was dry, I applied the first coat of finish thinned down to the max as per the instructions. After it had set for ~15 mins or so, I gently rubbed over the areas that I had applied the burnt-umber color using a damp cloth and just barely allowing the burnt-umber color to show through. After everything dried (24 hours) I did a final sanding using a 400 grit so as to wear away some paint and feather the edges where we wanted the worn areas to be exposed.

Final finish coat (thinned) was applied and using an artists brush (fan-tail) we brushed away the paint from the areas where the burnt umber was applied leaving just enough moss green color so it tinted the brown area ever so slightly and so that it looked realistically worn. It did look good but is very time consuming and doing 40 door fronts this way was not my SIL's idea of having fun - so they were painted with no artistic expression....

The glazing kit sounds like the best bang for the buck and the above is an alternative idea that also may work.

Bob S.

stain/glaze

Reply to
BobS

Wow! Isn't the internet great? I didn't really think I'd find anyone who was trying to do the same thing I was. I did make a little progress. On further inspection of the HD unfinished birch beadboard, I found that the bin that was marked "unfinished" was mostly full of finished boards, and the next bin also was, but was missing its label. So basically I was right. Those panels were finished, but there were 4 of 5 panels underneath the others, and these were clearly unfinished! Mystery solved. After seeing these panels I'm pretty sure the Kitchenmaid glaze kit will come out looking like the factory cabinets. I don't think I'm up for your method, which might be too much for a total of about 60' x 3' of bead board! It is interesting that they didn't sell it last year. It is listed in the HD books.

thanks for replying, dwhite

sister-in-law

Reply to
Dan White

I think Bill Clinton is very familiar with stains, ;-)

Gerry

Reply to
G.E.R.R.Y.

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