Kitchen Redux Part One -- The Kitchen Cabinet Edition

Our cabinets were a dark cherry, and they were fine, but I was so over that dark-wood look. Especially since we live in a place that rains nine months out of the year. I wanted my kitchen, at least, to be light and bright.

So, when I told my poor husband I wanted him to paint our kitchen cabinets for my birthday, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into. To be fair, I really didn’t either.

If you’ve read blog posts claiming this project can be done in a week (or God forbid, a weekend) for under $100, let me be the one to burst your bubble. That may be the case if you have three cabinets and some spare cans of paint in your garage. Or if you're willing to skip the prep work.

The truth? Our kitchen took us about two and a half weeks, with my husband using his vacation time and both of us putting in backbreaking, full-time hours to get the job done. It also cost upwards of $1000 to get the right supplies and quality paints and primers. Granted, I have a big kitchen, and we decided to do our family room bookshelves too. But, still, this isn’t the kind of project you want to tackle if you’re planning to cut corners. 

Okay, so let me preface this by saying that a) neither my husband nor I are professionals. Far from it. We gathered our information the good ol’ fashioned way: from Pinterest and blog posts. So if you’re reading this, you are getting our opinions and personal experience. And b) we painted our cabinets before doing our countertop project (which you can read about here). If we’d been smarter, we would have done the counters first, in order to avoid potential damage to our shiny new paint job. We didn’t, so instead, we stressed about the possibility the ENTIRE TIME we were working on our counters. I was a wreck!

First up, the tools:

After a lot of research, we decided to use a paint sprayer. We figured that not only would this save us a lot of time on the doors and drawer faces, but we also wouldn’t have unsightly brush strokes. We were right. I can’t say enough about our sprayer—I highly, highly recommend going this route if you want professional quality-looking cabinets!

Caveat: We only used the sprayer for our cabinet doors and drawer faces, which we sprayed in a homemade paint booth that we set up our garage (I’ll show pics of that too). We decided to hand paint our cabinet boxes and moldings. In hindsight, I wish we would have taken the extra time (and it would have been a lot of extra time to tape and mask off our entire kitchen) to spray all of those too. As it was, hand painting was VERY time-consuming. The sprayer would have been great for this too.

·      Paint Gun  

·      Liquid Deglosser

·      220 Grit Sanding Blocks

·      Scotch Brite Scouring Pads

·      Tack Cloths

·      Dixie Cups

·      4 ml Plastic Sheeting (we used this for the walls of our spray booths

·      Lighter weight (0.3 ml) plastic for everything else

·      Tape

·      Pizza Stands

The primer and paint:

We went with Benjamin Moore Advance Paint at $55/can for our cabinets. I know it’s a lot, but this paint is self-leveling and SO forgiving. Here is a picture where it came out of the gun super “bubbled,” but when I came back several hours later the surface was almost perfectly smooth. 

I only needed to lightly sand and before the second coat, which came out looking like it was straight from the factory!

For primer, we used Benjamin Moore Fresh Start Int/Ext Latex Primer, which came in at $45/can, but we probably should have used their Enamel Underbody since we quickly discovered that our primer didn’t work inside our family room bookshelves, which, as it turned out, was laminate. The latex primer was just sliding off. So…off to the store again, where we picked up Kilz enamelprimer.  This stuff reeked to high heaven, but it dried fast and did the trick. We probably could have used this for our entire kitchen, but, like I said, that smell. My lungs thanked me when I finally put the lid back on the can.

Getting started.

This was the hard part because I was itching to paint, but that was still days away. The prep work required patience and a lot of elbow grease.

The first thing we did was tape off our garage, using large sheets of plastic to create our “spray booth.” And because it was still hovering around freezing outside (and because our garage was being used to spray), we had to set up an indoor space where our cabinet doors could dry, so we also taped off our formal living room to keep pets and kids out. 

Next, we emptied all of our cabinets and I drew a “map” of our kitchen. I read about this, but it turned out to be even more important than I realized. You don’t want to mix up which cabinet door goes where once they’re painted and you’re putting them back—doors and hardware don’t fit quite the same if you put them back in the wrong place. I also put the hardware into baggies that I labeled not just by cabinet number, but also by whether the hardware was for the top, middle, or bottom of the door. Once my husband took a door down and the hardware off, I wrote the corresponding cabinet number in Sharpie inside one of the hardware spaces and stuck a piece of painter’s tape over it so it could be easily removed after we were finished painting.

Then, we taped and papered the kitchen floors to protect our hardwood before we began deglossing every cabinet door and drawer front. We have 38 cabinet doors and 10 drawer fronts, so this took us an entire day.

The next day, we sanded everything we’d already deglossed using 220 grit sandpaper.  Blocks are great for flat surfaces, but in places where you have rounded corners and grooves, I loved the Scotch Brite scouring pads. After sanding, we used tack cloth to get all the grit and dust off so the primer could really get in there and adhere. While my husband finished up sanding and tack clothing, I started spraying the cabinet doors and drawers with primer. You want to spray the backs of the doors first so that when you flip them you aren’t laying them on the nice smooth fronts that will be facing the world! If there are any flaws, better to have them on the back, right?

(Finding room for almost 50 doors and drawers to dry was like the world’s worst game. I was constantly jostling for more space. Thankfully, I’d invested in these handy dandy pizza stands, which couldn’t hold the large doors, but were perfect for a lot of the medium and smaller ones!)

You want to give the primer 24 hours to dry on each side. So while we waited for the first side of primer to dry, we went to work deglossing and sanding the cabinet boxes and moldings. Then, we put a coat of primer on those as well.

After 24 hours, we flipped the cabinet doors and drawers and did a coat of primer on the fronts. At first, I was using these little painters triangles to hold the doors while I sprayed, but after a while, they’d get paint on them, so I sent my husband to the store to buy disposable Dixie cups. I used those instead, replacing them frequently. So much easier!

(During all of this, we were also working on our bookshelves, which added at least (at least!) three days to our project. Like I mentioned, we had a minor primer fiasco with the laminate, but we got that under control by switching to the Kilz primer. Again, the sprayer would have saved us a TON of time. But, live and learn…)

 After all of the priming, it was time for more sanding. YAY…? I used the Scotch Brite pads to lightly sand the primer, then more tack cloth to clean it all up.

Finally, time to paint. For real paint.

Again, I started with the door backs and did one coat of Benjamin Moore Advance. Since the spray had a hard time hitting the sides/edges of the cabinet doors and drawers completely, I used a foam roller to do those. Then, I let them dry for 24 hours before flipping them to do the backs and waiting ANOTHER 24 hours.

While waiting for paint to dry, you can work on the cabinet boxes, which will also need two coats, waiting 24 hours between each coat. We used a foam roller for the flat surfaces and brush for the grooved surfaces, trim, and molding. In some places, we needed to do three coats to get the brush strokes just right, but there wasn’t a lot of extra work with this paint since it is almost completely self-leveling, which was why we picked this paint!

After the first coat is completely dry, you’ll want to do another light sanding, more tack cloth, before going to work on your second coat. I know, it sounds like overkill, and when you see how good your cabinets look after one coat (especially if you use the sprayer), you might want to call it good, but trust me, take the extra step (and spend the extra money on paint) to do it right. We were exhausted, tired of eating takeout, and so over this project, but now that it’s done, we are so glad we took our time.

In the end, we used more paint than we thought we would. We did our main cabinets is one color Simply White and our island in a different color (Chelsea Gray by Benjamin Moore). We went through two cans of Benjamin Moore primer and one can of Kilz (which is still more than half full), one gallon and one quart of the Chelsea Gray paint for the island, and two gallons and one quart of the Simply White for the cabinets and bookshelves. That’s a grand total of $350 for paint and primer alone. But, like I said, we have a big kitchen.

Pro tip: If you notice drips, either from the paint sprayer, or from hand painting, and they’ve dried already, here’s an easy fix: Use a paint scraper, 5-in-1 one tool, or razor blade (my preference) to gently remove the drip, then lightly sand the edges and touch up with paint.

Once our two coats of paint were completely dry and we’d touched up drips (and maybe that one time I grabbed the door while it was still wet and left my handprint on it…great for CSI but bad for kitchen aesthetics!), we were finally ready for that “map” I’d made. We got to work putting our cabinets back together. I’d ordered new handles, so my husband had the super-fun project of drilling new holes, with me hovering over him telling him “not to ruin” the paint—he loves those little pep talks!

I loved the finished product, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that I still thought our granite was too dark, we would have thrown in the towel and called it, because, frankly, WE WERE EXHAUSTED. Unfortunately, for both of us (and our aching backs), this was only phase one.

You can see our counter project here.