Painted Cabinets After 1 Year

These beautiful painted cabinets in our farmhouse kitchen have been painted for 1 year! You won’t believe how they’re wearing, and see what we’ve changed!

I have been getting a few people asking about how our painted cabinets have held up. Are they yellow?  Did you seal them? Are they peeling yet? How horrible do they look with the kids using them, because I am afraid to paint mine!

Did you know they’ve just turned a whole year old!? A whole year of getting hit with whatever the kids have in their messy little hands, banging stools on the doors, messy cooking by yours truly, and being wiped off countless times. Guess what?

They look amazing.

If you are interested in taking a trip back in time to learn how to begin this gigantic undertaking, you can get all the steps by clicking here!

This post may contain affiliate links.  See my full disclosure policy, here. 

Here is the original kitchen we started with:

The cabinets are gorgeous to begin with, but there’s a back story with a dream of white cabinetry and no intention of paying for the builder to do it.

During this process, we had no cabinet doors for like… weeks. Weeks of chaos for my eyeballs. So much time spent letting paint dry. So many nights painting after the kids went to bed. All the logistics.

All those steps and prep work are 100% WORTH IT.  I’m telling you. I have painted my share of projects in speedy fashion in the name of doing it quickly, but they never last. The projects where I have put in all the effort, time, prep, curing time, lightly finish sanding clear coats… they last.

Here are the painted cabinets in all their bright and fresh glory, 1 year ago:

Here they sit, 1 year later:

Sidebar, do you like my paint swatches on the left?  Taking 67 colors for a test run! I think I’m going with the bottom beige.  Let me know what you think. 

You guys, these painted cabinets look as amazing as the day we did finished them a year ago. We are SO very rough on these cabinets, and they have been cleaned with scrubby brushes, hit with bikes and stools and nerf darts, and the kids are not gentle when putting away dishes at all. It’s showing the tiniest bit of wear in places where regular use is pretty rough and frequent…

The spots on the drawers aren’t chips, they’re black paint spots from a hastily painted stool the kids slammed against it a few times coming around the corner. The paint is still looking perfect otherwise on those drawers. The cabinet with dishes in it is the only spot that’s wearing like this. The last photo is the knobs of the cabinet with dishes, and it’s only got 3 itty bitty teeny tiny noticeable-to-me-because-I-know-it’s-there places (on the left door by the knob) where we open and close the door literally 45,000,000 times per day.

As far as updates we’ve made, we have lost 1 stool to missing a screw, so we play rotating stools between here and the dining room. We covered the vent hood to lighten it up a little bit, swapped out the window shelf for a lighter colored one to match the vent hood cover, and lightened the kitchen table stain color.  Which was taking a severe beating from the kids and daily use, so we were going to lightly sand and touch it up, but I just decided to strip it all off and go lighter to match the vent hood and shelf.

The only 2 massive projects I would like to tackle in here next are the counters (I would love a butcher block, solid surface, marble or quartz counter (read: use that money to replace the carpeting and just paint this to look like marble), and I am itching to finish the backsplash with an actual tile  (just a white subway, nothing mind blowing)… by Thanksgiving. This is the first Andrew is hearing about a deadline, so lets see how this goes.

We still sit and stare at how big of a difference these white painted cabinets have made in balancing out this side of the house with the living room, it’s ridiculous. I’d do it all over again, and recommend anyone to go for it.

Everything else is still the same, mostly. Including the greenery wreath, and that fishing rod.

Do you get my newsletters? Sign up for those, right here. Or over on the right sidebar. Or down below this post. Because this…  this mess is real life, pre photoshoot, and I set it out to all my friends on that mailing list.  Follow me on Instagram to see more of the ‘real life’ bits!

Save the non-clutterery version for inspiration: