10 Tips on Painting Kitchen Cabinets

Are you thinking of painting your kitchen cabinets? It certainly can be a way to get a whole new look with minimal outlay of cash. But don’t believe anybody who tells you it’s going to be easy. I’ve searched the web to gather some of the best tips, examples, and articles to give you everything you’ll need to know before you start.

1: The first three tips are for cabinets that are wood and have never been painted, or if the existing finish is in good condition and you just don’t like it. Painting cabinets is hard, and once you start there’s no going back. First, edit – be ruthless getting rid of clutter in your kitchen, find other places to store things you use only once or twice a year. Then take a really good look – could you get the effect you want by cleaning the cabinets really well, restoring the finish, and changing the hardware?

2: Painting walls is relatively easy. If your cabinets don’t cover every inch of the walls, you can distract attention from them by painting the walls around them in bold or warm colors:

photo Scavolini

via mamaphunk.com

3: Are there other changes you could make? Perhaps new window treatments, new back splash, new linoleum, new light fixtures, or few new or vintage accessories that work with your freshly painted walls will make the cabinet finish less important. Come up with a theme or a concept, so that everything works together visually. Try making a mood board. Look at kitchens on design blogs like Apartment Therapy, Desire to Inspire, Design*Sponge, etc – it’s not perfection that makes a kitchen special, personality and pizazz are much more important.

4: Still reading? Then you’ve probably decided you really do need to paint. 4 through 6 are the most important tips: Preparation

5. Preparation.

6. Preparation. I’m not going to try to emulate the experts here – I’m only a designer after all, not a painter. The best and most detailed articles about preparation and painting that I found are at This Old House. Painting Kitchen Cabinets discusses the pros and cons of painting cabinets, hiring a pro to do it for you, types of paint and sandpaper to use, repairing existing cabinets first, replacing hardware and cabinet elements such as drawer boxes. Pro Secrets for Painting Kitchen Cabinets gives a good sense of the time and effort involved, and includes actual lists of all the things you’ll need for preparation and painting, with links to sources for many of them.

7. Read How not to Paint Kitchen Cabinets at Becoming Home, for a grim foreshadowing of what happens if you skip steps. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did! Another good read is How to Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets at Young House Love – you’ll see a really great repaint, plus before and after pictures and more how-to tips.

8. A few web sources for those who are more visually inclined: on YouTube, Painting Kitchen Cabinets, Ask the Decorator and Painting Kitchen Cabinets, Ask the Builder are two sides of the same coin, short videos that show how take the doors off, how to apply deglosser, and how apply the the paint with a brush, etc. Useful if you are new to painting. The article Painting Kitchen Cabinets, at Popular Mechanics has clear diagrams of preparation and painting techniques. A couple of important tips that might easily be missed – when you remove the cabinet doors, undo the bottom hinge first. Number the doors and mark the top, so you’ll get them back in the right place without confusion.

9. Know where to stop painting – check here for some before and after shots that tell a story. Sure, the before kitchen was very dark, but this family painted everything, even the knobs and the brick and the paneling. The warmth of the natural brick would have been a nice contrast in the new white kitchen.

10. Think about other changes you can make at the same time as painting – perhaps you can remove some doors and create a display cabinet? Since you are painting anyway, you can add some trim to give the shelves a thicker edge, or to create a frame around the cabinet. Or consider routing some doors and adding glass and molding (See The Doghouse Gramdma’s 50’s Kitchen Redux). You don’t have to paint the cabinet interiors, but you could add a contrasting color, or a deeper shade of the exterior one, especially in display cabinets.

via The Doghouse

11. (OK, I can’t count). Be bold – you don’t have to stick to one color. Here are a few examples to get your creative juices flowing: some great cabinet transformations at Design*Sponge Before and Afters, and this example at Apartment Therapy.