Can I remove laminate from kitchen cabinet doors and refinish with wood stain?

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How to remove the laminate and determine the wood type underneath. How to treat the wood after removing so the stain finish looks good.

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  1. GenevievesMom says:
    August 30, 2010 at 2:04 am

    If you have laminate cabinets, then the wood beneath is a poor quality particle board. It wouldn’t be easy to remove and the final door would look wretched. But there is an alternative or two. Most home stores sell a couple of products that can be put over your laminate and stained to look like real wood. The first is a 1/4" veneered plywood. Only the final layer is "perfect" wood finish. You can have it cut at the store (just a 1/2"-1" larger than the actual door size), then take it home and adhere it to your cabinet doors with Liquid Nails and clamps (or lay them flat and use heavy books to weigh them down) until it dries (about 2 hours). Then use a small handheld router with a laminate bit to trim around the edges. Sand it with 180 sand paper, smoothing the edges and smoothing the surface. Remember to sand with the grain. Wipe it with a tack cloth, then stain and seal with 2-3 coats of polyurethane to seal it, sanding lighting between coats and wiping with a tack cloth. Hubby and I just refaced our cabinets this way and the whole kitchen was under $100 and the final product was just beautiful red oak cabinets. Each sheet of veneer plywood was $29 for a 4′x8′ sheet.

    The other product is a little more expensive, but very easy to work with (a 24" x 48" sheet runs around $35). It’s a laminate that you can put over your existing laminate, except this one is a wood veneer that you iron on and trim with a router. In addition, you can finish your base frame with 1"-2" veneer tape that goes on the same way. Then you stain and poly just like regular wood. In our case, for 9 doors, the frames, etc, it would have cost about $125 to do it this way. The other way worked well for us and we ended up with a very beautiful finished product. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but 2 of us did it in just a few hours of cutting, adhering and sanding, then one day of staining and varnishing. It wasn’t bad at all, especially since HD did the cutting for us…we just had to take the measurements with us.

  2. peedlepup says:
    August 30, 2010 at 2:04 am

    If your cabinet doors are "real" wood you can stain them, but if the doors were originally covered in laminate the wood underneath is probably "particle board" of cheap plywood .

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