Refinishing a piece of furniture is not an easy task. There are some options other than staining that might work for you, as they did for me. I refinished the outside of a couple of cabinets - I showed the step-by-step staining process in another section of this page - and now I am facing the challenge of re-doing the interior of them. I can simply do nothing about it, since I can only see the inside when I open the doors, but since I went through the trouble of making this piece of furniture nice and tried to give it a professional-looking finish, I decided to do something different and unique about the inside. I ventured to work with the doors and the back walls.

For the doors, my main problem was that they had the original finish - glossy and repellent of most products, including paint. For me to be able to paint, or even stick anything to them, I would have had to get the paint stripper out of the shelf and start the "stripping process" all over again. I thought of something different, though. Since I replaced my hardware with an Asian theme in mind, I decided to sponge the doors gold. I used an oil- based gold color (it stuck perfect to the surface) and with a rag, I applied here and there, covering most of the area.

Now, for the back of the cabinets, I used some wallpaper. I tried to find some style that again, matched the style I aimed at when I started the project. I needed something in gold, black and any other accent color. I used contact cement to help the paper stick to the walls and the results were great! Below are some step by step pictures of the process. Hope you enjoyed it!

Inside door BEFORE

Gold finish paint

Inside AFTER

Wallpaper Detail