The Ancient Basement–An Upper Cabinet from a Butler’s Pantry is Being Converted to a Built-In Bookcase

My husband and I drove to Rye, NY over Mother’s Day weekend to pick up a bunch of cabinets that we’re going to use in the basement.

Here they are when they were installed in that house:

The upper cabinets are about 40″ tall, and we’re going to make a base for them to sit on. They were built on-site, so they don’t have a top, so we’ll have to add that to them as well. Anyway, I started stripping them over the holiday weekend because it was so stinking hot here that we didn’t want to be outside (except that my husband had a horrible outside project that I ended up helping him with–putting a 4″ PVC pipe under the sidewalk out into the yard to drain the downspout we added).

First, I had to take out all the shelves, and the brackets:

I also removed the little magnet cabinet stops on the bottom. I coated everything with Citrustrip and put plastic over it to keep the stripper from drying out before it could work its magic.

The next day, I pulled the plastic and scraped a BUNCH of paint off.

I repeated the process 2 more times, and this is what it looks like after I finished.

On the last pass, I used my little woodworking scraper instead of a putty knife. I also removed the molding at the top (we’re going to have to make new molding), and some door stops on the insides of the cabinets that were making it hard to work on. I am down to the very bottom layer of paint at this point. It was only ever painted green or white, but it went through several iterations of the colors. While this was quite a bit of work, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. (It’s been a long time since I have stripped paint off anything, and putting the plastic over it is a game changer.)

We’re going to use the lower cabinets (pictured above) in the bar area, and they are going to be green–probably similar to the very first color these were ever painted. We’re waiting on a tile sample to make the final color selection–we’ve decided to use the same tile in the bar/kitchenette, and in the bathroom, and the cabinets and molding will be the same green in both rooms.

So the next step is to move the cabinet off of the drop cloth, and roll the drop cloth up because it’s such a mess. I’m going to do another light coat of stripper and put plastic over it, and let it sit for about 24 hours. Then I’ll scrape it again. At that point, all the paint should be gone, and I’ll be able to wash off any remaining stripper, sand it, and put some wood filler in the cracks, etc. and sand it to 100 grit, which is fine enough for a painted finish. Then I will prime it well and sand it smooth.

Then, it’ll be time to build the frame and get it attached to the wall. I think that we’re going to need to add cabinet grade 1/2″ plywood behind the shelf so that we have something solid to mount everything to. We’ll also have to build new molding for the top of the bookshelf, and build a top for it. We’ll wrap the frame at the bottom with baseboard. We’re going to paint this bookshelf the same color as the trim in the rest of the basement–Brushwood from the ICI/Dulux paint book.

I need to unwrap the doors and see what we’re going to need to do with them. I would like to lightly sand them, mask them, and spray them. We’ll see.

I took the shelves and brackets to Chattanooga to be professionally stripped, because they are solid boards with no glue joints, and they can do them all at once, and I really don’t have the space to do 9 shelves that are about 40″ wide.

A lot more to come!