How we painted our kitchen cabinets
Date: Oct 2nd, 2008 5:18:20 am - Subscribe
Mood: bright
Our kitchen cabinets were from the 60's. The doors were some sort of mahogany I was told, but the boxes of the cabinetry were handmade-some sort of plywood or hardboard maybe?
To paint them, I washed them several times with hot soapy water. They were covered in layers of grease and very nasty!
After washing them, I removed the handles and the hinges. My one little trick though, was that I left one hinge attached to each door. On that hinge I placed a piece of painter's tape with a number on it. That way I could match it up to the right "box" when I was ready to hang them up again.
Then I used wood filler on the holes where the handles had been. If you are putting your same handles back on you can skip this step, but my new handles had holes in different spots. I let that dry, sanded it down, put another coat on, and sanded that. My husband added the mouldings(Don't ask me what size or kind of moulding because I have no clue) on the front.
I didn't sand the "boxes" of the cabinetry because they were not a slick smooth surface, but I DID sand the doors lightly because they had a shiny finish on them. Afterward I wiped them with a damp cloth to get the dust off.
The cabinetry was painted with 3 coats of semi-gloss interior latex paint, in Cloud White from Benjamin Moore. We lived with those cabinets for almost three years, and not ONE scratch, dent, or flake of paint came off them when we moved out.
I painted the boxes first, and worked from the top down. I painted the inside first, top to bottom, and then the outside. The doors were laid out on sawhorses and painted, then flipped over after a few hours and the other side was painted.
I used a small high density foam roller and a 2 inch angled brush for the corners and moulding.
We let everything dry for about two days so that we wouldn't have any cabinet doors sticking when we tried to open them. Then we re-hung the doors(this is where the numbers on the doors come in handy) and installed the new door handles.
That was about it! Very simple! I was really intimidated to start, but I figured I couldn't screw them up any worse than they already looked. Once I did it, I realized it was a very easy project and there was really no way I could "Ruin" it.
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