Painting Cabinets

I had a comment on the Kitchen post asking about the cabinet painting process, so I figured I'd just make a post about it.

Here's what we did (not professional instructions, but it worked for us!):

1. Took off one cabinet door and did steps 2-4 to make sure that the paint adhered well / we liked the color / etc. It would have been a RUDE awakening to finish this whole project and find that something wasn't quite right!

2. Took off all doors, drawers, and hardware. If you think it may be a problem, you may want to number the doors and sketch out the layout so that it's easier to figure out where each one goes when you're putting them back up. We didn't do this, though, and were fine. Also, we did not take everything (or anything) out of our cabinets... I guess I'm just lazy. (Don't worry, when the whole process was over, I did go through and clean things that would have gotten dirty.)

3. Sanded all surfaces that were going to be painted with a fine grain sandpaper. Wiped them clean.

4. Painted our hearts out. A few notes about the painting...

-We used Benjamin Moore "Linen White" in semi-gloss, oil based. I despise oil based paint, but it's definitely the way to go for cabinets. I got one gallon, of which we used about 3/4.

-We did NOT use any primer... The man in BM said that their paint should be thick enough that you don't need primer.

-Every surface got three coats of paint.

-When painting the cabinet doors, we set each one on top of a smaller, old box. This made it super easy to paint the sides of the doors without them touching the ground. (We have a pretty big, unfinished basement which is so nice for messy projects.)

-As far as the cabinet "bones" go, we just painted the fronts... didn't paint the insides. You can choose to stop wherever you want, but we figured this was the easiest:

-Since you're working with oil-based paint, I DEFINITELY recommend just buying abunch (a bunch?) of sponge brushes and rollers. Don't make the mistake that I did on Day 1 of trying to clean your brushes with mineral spirits. I just about flipped my lid. I used almost a whole can of mineral spirits, the brushes/my arms/the sink still had paint covering them, and I freaked. Josh called my parents and held the phone up to my ear and Dad told me not to worry about doing that and to just throw away the brushes when you're done. Easy enough. I hate even cleaning out brushes with latex paint, so that sounded like a GREAT solution to me. Plus, I think it motivated me to get as much painting in at one time since I knew I'd be throwing away the brush when I stopped.

5. When everything is fully painted, dry, and lovely as can be, put those cabinet doors and drawers back on!

Warning: This project took us almost a full week of painting every day, so it's definitely not a weekend project! (Which was what I had intended it to be.) But, we are SO happy with how it turned out and are very, very glad we did it. If you want to paint your cabinets, I recommend just buying the paint, taking off that first door and painting it.... once you get started, there's no going back... you can't put it off any longer!

Hope this helps, Haley, and whoever else! Let me know if you have any more questions!! (I don't think I left out any tidbits of information, but if Josh has any more suggestions after he reads this then I will add them.)