How to Veneer kitchen cabinets and other flat surfaces

Rotating Corner Shelf Sets. Get to that wasted space in the back of corner shelves. 3/4 lazy susan has a chunk 1/4 of the area of the shelves taken out for the 90° turn in the cabinets. Spins around to have the items in the back at your fingertips.

How to Veneer kitchen cabinets

After you finish this page you should know how to veneer kitchen cabinets with peel and stick real wood veneer.

If you've heard of the procedure for reveneering with contact cement and all the trimmings and have shied away from doing any veneer work, block it all from your mind. The pressure sensitive veneer process is really pretty simple and more like using contact shelf paper.

Preparing the surface

Preparing the surface is probably the most important part of the whole veneering project.

You can strip a painted surface or an old clear finish down to the bare wood, fill any blemishes with wood filler, sand by hand or with a handheld sander with a very fine Sandpaper and clean very thoroughly with a Tack Cloth. Any sanding dust left behind will cause the veneer to not stick properly, so clean the sanding dust well.

To make the project a lot easier, if the old surface is sound, you can skip the stripping part and just prepare the old finish or paint to accept the veneer.

You'll still need to deal with any blemishes and sand the surface smooth and remove any sanding dust.

If the old surface is sound, blemish free and smooth all you'll need to do is clean it with a good Furniture Cleaner. This furniture cleaner is designed for heavy duty cleaning.

Veneer can be used on most surfaces

These instructions about how to veneer can be used on most surfaces.

If you have a book case with an old wood grain photo plastic sheeting on particle board starting to peel don't replace the whole book case, just finish peeling the plastic sheeting off and veneer it with real wood veneer.

If you look around you'll probably see lots of surfaces that can be renewed with real wood veneer.

Easy to Use

The veneer is very easy to use. It has a paper backing that makes the very thin wood a lot stronger while you're working with it than raw veneer is. If you're very careful while cutting the veneer for size and get the edges perfectly straight, you can join two or more leftover pieces together to cover a wider area. Look closely at your old kitchen cabinet doors to see where there may be joined pieces and how they handled grain patterns. Kitchen cabinet ends are another good place to check.

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Check For Fit

Check the veneer pieces against each other to be sure that they fit snugly together and that the veneer pattern of each piece look good together. If one piece has large graceful swirls and another piece has many tight turns they won't go together too well, so keep shifting pieces until you have good matches.

Measure Kitchen Cabinets Carefully

The veneer comes in two sizes, 24 inch by 32 inch and 24 inch by 96 inch.

If you measure carefully and plan your job well you can come out with a minimum of wasted material, which is wasted money. A good way to plan is with graph paper and draw diagrams of all the pieces of your cupboards, doors, kitchen cabinet ends, frames and stiles, the up and down pieces that the door hinges attach to, up and down pieces between the doors, back and forth pieces at the tops and bottoms of the doors (and drawers), drawer fronts and any other parts that I missed listing.

Write the dimensions on your diagrams and draw arrows to indicate the direction of the grain pattern.

Allow at least 1/4 inch extra in each direction, because it's very difficult to cut a piece of veneer the exact size of a kitchen cabinet door and lay it exactly without a thin strip being missed along one edge.

Check Kitchen Cabinets for Square

Each dimension should be checked for square. A door that appears perfectly square can be off by a little, which adds up to a lot.

If you don't have a square, measure from the upper left corner diagonally down to the lower right hand corner and from the upper right hand corner diagonally down to the lower left hand corner. If the dimensions are different the piece isn't square. For example a door may measure the same on both sides and the same on the top and bottom, but cut at a slight angle on the top and bottom, so that one side is slightly higher than the other, say the right side is 1/8 inch higher than the left side. If both sides are equal length and you cut a piece of veneer exactly as long as the sides and made it's corners squared you would end up with 1/8 inch of old kitchen cabinet surface uncovered at the top and 1/8 inch overlap at the bottom, so be sure to allow extra stock for working. You won't notice the difference in appearance with a stand alone door, but you need to make allowances for fitting the veneer properly on the door.

Cut The Veneer Pieces

Lay the veneer out and plan how grain patterns will look together, but when it comes time to cut the veneer, do one piece at a time. Production line worked good for Ford Model T's, but if you're going to make a mistake with a measurement or cut, just make mistakes one at a time and not on a whole bunch of pieces at once, it can get expensive and one or two mistakes can generally be used elsewhere.

Always start with the largest piece first, then if you do make a mistake you can definitely use the veneer on a smaller piece.

Now with that aside, we know you aren't going to make any mistakes, so we can proceed to the Next Page of applying veneer to your kitchen cabinets or you can go to Kitchen Cabinet Refacing Menu to review some of the other subjects.

See veneer information for more about veneer.