It seemed like a pretty simple process: take all the doors off, paint the frames of the cabinets, then the doors, and put it all back together, right?! Well yes it was that simple and the spraying part wasn’t the hardest part, believe it or not, it was taping everything off! The first thing we did before taping it all off was clean everything really well with some soapy water. You could use a degreaser if need be as well. Then we lightly sanded everything and used a de-glosser like this.
We decided that we didn’t want to paint the insides of the cabinets. We figured with dishes going in and out of them the paint would just end up scratching off. In hind sight I wish we had just painted them and put in some wallpaper or liners on the shelves. That would have made life so much easier! We took masking paper and taped it into the fronts of the cabinet openings and taped plastic up everywhere else to keep the walls from being painted, we left the counters because we knew they were going to get dumped anyways.
If you are planning on painting your walls anyway then you don’t need to go to this much trouble. We decided to number our cabinets and put stickies on each door and drawer so that we knew where it belonged when we were putting everything back together. For example the upper cabinets were numbered left to right and the labels said U1, U2, U3, etc. If your cabinets are all the same size then it probably doesn’t matter if they end up in the same spots but ours were different sizes throughout.
We used a professional paint sprayer. Everyone has that friend that, “knows a guy” right? Well we do too and that friend had a guy with a professional sprayer that he let us use. You could use any type of sprayer though, we’ve used this one before and had good results. It’s easy to use and clean, it just doesn’t hold as much paint as a professional sprayer does so you’ll have to fill it more often. Or you could rent a Pro Sprayer from your local hardware store.
To paint the doors we put small eye hooks into the ends that wouldn’t be visible when they were hung back up, and hung them up on some wire hangers. We also made sure to tape the cabinet labels to the hanger so we would know where to put it back. Our garage then became a painting studio as we sprayed all the doors.
We sprayed everything really well once and let it dry overnight. Then came back the next day and sprayed a second coat. We let it all dry overnight again and then did small touch ups on the third day. You may have to do some sanding on a spots that run or get too much paint on them. This process is not quick so make sure you know that you” be out of a kitchen for probably a week. We hadn’t moved into our house yet when we did this so it didn’t matter to us how long it took. We didn’t use any special type of paint either. Just your regular paint from your local hardware store in a high gloss finish. One thing that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, told us to make sure we use was this! You just add it to your paint to help it have a smoother finish. You could use this if you decide to roll or brush your paint on. It’s supposed to help illuminate brush and roller marks.
After a day or two of letting everything really dry we started the process of putting it all back together. As you take off the plastic and tape you may need to take a brush to a few spots but it seemed to blend really well and we didn’t have any problems with seeing brush marks. Having everything labeled made a huge difference when putting it all back to where it belonged! It was so easy!
When we were all done putting everything back together we had our granite installer come out. Then it was on to the backsplash! I hope this helped you if you are thinking to spray your cabinets instead of rolling them! Leave a comment and let me know if you tried it or have any other tips to share!
