Stained Glass Window Film

Archive for the ‘Etched Glass Film’ Category

I have a close friend of our family that I hadn’t seen for a long while.  Just recently I visited his home for a summer’s end party and found out that they remodeled their kitchen over the past several months.  Its certainly a beautiful remodel and I took special note of the cabinet doors.

Instead of entirely replacing their kitchen cabinets they decided to only do cabinet refacing and replacement of the doors.   In general,  my friend was  happy with the layout and functional use of his existing cabinets.  What he didn’t like though, was the cabinet doors and faces.   So with some ingenuity from his general contracter, they replaced the sides of the cabinets and then door frames entirely.  The new design is made of real etched and frosted glass.   It looks very, very nice.

As I was driving home that night, I began to wonder if a creative home decorating effort could produce similar results using etched glass window film, or even frosted glass window film.  I know that it might be able to save on some of the cost as my friend had to order specially cut glass with fancy etching in it.  It cost a lot (although not as much as full cabinet replacement.)   Hmmm….very interesting.  Lets dig a little deeper.

My friend’s refaced cabinet doors were wood framed doors with a glass insert and a “snap-on” wood frame that held the glass so it wouldn’t rattle or fall out if the door was opened quickly.  The frame also had some very tiny brackets to “hold” the wood frame down to the back of the frame.  They were not very visible and didn’t detract from the look of the cabinet door at all.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera with me at the time of the party, or otherwise I would have loved to snap a few photos of his cabinets.   As such, I’ve put a few other pictures of cabinet faces  here in this article to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.

So back to the question, which  is whether or not we could get a similar look by using custom cut clear glass (which is fairly easy to obtain from your local glass shop) and then using a decorative window film on it as a substitute for the genuine etched glass?

Its something I need to keep on my radar screen.  As of today, I haven’t tried it personally…as I really don’t have a test case yet.  However I am fairly confident that if done correctly, this could turn out quite nicely.

The cost savings from such a project would really revolve around not using the etched glass and instead using the window film. Window film would no doubt be cheaper.  The door frames and cabinet refacing costs would be the same.  A huge positive though for using decorative window film, would be that in the future, if you decided to “update” your kitchen’s look again, it would be simple to replace the adhesive free window film with another type and get all new cabinet faces in a single afternoon.  Cool.