I believe the first thing you need to do when contemplating painting cabinets is to take a real long look and decide how much. Just the face of the cabinet frames and the outside of the doors? Paint everything including the insides.

Personally, even if you held a really big gun (and I mean something like a bazooka) you could not make me paint the inside of cabinets and fortunately I have cabinets with decent interiors.

How much do you want to paint?

So how much did I want to paint. The current green is only on the outside of the doors and I had already decided I wanted to paint both sides of the doors. Next the cabinet frames. I want them to really feel like white cabinets when I  open the doors (hence painting the inside of the doors) so I scrutinized where I wanted to draw the line on white. I wanted to let difficulty dictate it — not going to go there if it was too hard to do.

The shelves on the base cabinets were recessed so I wasn’t worried about them. The design of the base cabinets made it easy to paint the inside of the door opening. I felt the upper cabinets needed the same treatment — paint the inside of the door opening. Paint the front of the shelves? The are covered with trims that cups the front edge of the shelves so I decided to paint the top, front, and bottom of this trim.

You have to make these decisions first so you know what to prep. The more you paint the more you prep — unless you’re painting everything.

I covered the table and all the boxes of my packed kitchen with plastic and taped plastic over the doorway to to living room to try to contain the sanding dust.

It’s important that all grease, oils, and dirt be removed so that nothing interferes with the paint adhering, so after I had removed the doors and drawers and taken off all the hardware I used a strong solution of Dawn dish washing soap (known for it’s grease cutting) and a scrubbie pad and scrubbed the living daylights out of every surface I was going to paint.

After washing I went back and thoroughly rinsed everything to make sure there was no soap residue left on the surfaces. Again — maybe this was overkill since I was going to be sanding, but after seeing the sides of the stove I chose to err on the side of caution. Nothing would be worse than painting all the cabinets and several months down the road have the paint start peeling.

I used my palm sander with 60 grit sandpaper and went over all the surfaces I planned to paint. I followed up with 220 grit paper to smooth the surface.

It may have been overkill but after cleaning up all the sanding dust, I followed this with wiping all the surfaces with deglosser. I know there are VOC versions of this stuff and I would recommend getting it. I had the non-VOC version and the fumes were horrible. The rag I used went outside as soon as I finished.

Last thing to do was to tape off the bottom shelved of the wall cabinets to delineate the inside of the opening from the floor of the cabinet.

FYI – I dreaded pulling out the stove. I wasn’t sure how it would slide over the floor and expected the floor underneath it to be gross. The floor wasn’t gross. The sides of the stove were disgusting. Lots and lots of cooking grease has run down the sides and never been cleaned. Note to self — if you live somewhere with a stove, pull the things out once a year and clean the sides. I’ve lived with a built-in oven and cooktop previous to this, so never had to deal with it.

Ready for Primer

After a lot of sanding, washing, and deglossing I felt the cabinet frames were ready for primer. Painting cabinets is such a big job I wanted to make sure the paint stuck really well.I didn’t mention, but I also sanded and deglossed the black toe kick board under the cabinets so I could get it painted white to match the cabinets.

Putting on the primer

Painting the frames is covering a lot of narrow areas. I opted to use a wool small roller to get the smoothest finish possible. You have to use a really light touch with the roller to avoid runs. I used a brush to get the corner of the openings, along the wall, and the sides of the shelf trim close to the door openings. Then I rolled the inside of the door openings and the shelf trim top, bottom, and front, and finally the front of the wall cabinets. Since I had pulled the stove out it was easy to reach the inside of the cabinets facing the stove.

The last thing I did on the wall cabinets was paint the bottoms. They consisted of a lot of cutting in with a brush and then rolling the bottom wood.

I moved on to the base cabinets, using a brush again to do the inside corners of the openings, rolled the inside of the door openings, rolled the fronts and then the toe kick area. Yikes. Painting cabinets is tedious, tedious, tedious…

A note about primer. Some people think you have to completely blot out the surface below the primer. The primer I was using was meant to be a binding layer between the old paint and the new paint — not completely cover the old paint. I confirmed this with the folks at Benjamin Moore. So while I did make sure I had an even layer of primer on all surfaces, you could still see the green through it. Benjamin Moore told me a second coat of primer is not necessary.

The worst part of painting cabinets

Without question the worst part of the process is the under side of the wall cabinets. I ended up clearing off the counters and laying on my back so I could see what I was doing and it was still a pain. There is so much that has to be painted with a brush because of the insets. I don’t feel like it looks all that great, but I don’t figure too many people are going to perusing the bottom of my cabinets so as long as they’re white, I’m not going to worry about it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Note the additional electrical outlets on the backsplash on either side of the sink and the old-fashioned board is gone over the sink 🙂

Need I mention how hard it is to use a kitchen while you’re doing this kind of project. If it wasn’t for the stove surface, I’m not sure what I would have done…

This shows how much I painted on the frames