One of the most expensive rooms in your house to remodel is the kitchen. An alternative to a costly remodel is to take on smaller projects within the kitchen, like painting your cabinets. We specialize in cabinet painting in the Columbus, Ohio area and this article will walk you through the process on one of our recently projects.
Cabinet Painting In Dublin, Ohio
The most common cabinet projects we come across are the ones with dark wood cabinets like you see in the picture below. Homeowners are tired of the dark wood and want to modernize their space. Paint is a prefect option and these cabinets are an ideal surface.
We remove all the doors and drawers and take them off site to our shop to finish them. For the cabinets, we create a spray booth in the home which allows us to spray the boxes. The kitchen is not usable for about three days, but it is well worth it.
Prep Work
Most of the time spent doing a cabinet project like this one is spent doing prep work. After we remove all the doors and drawers we spend a great deal of time getting the surfaces “paint ready”. Here’s a look at what the prep work looked like for these cabinets.
- Clean the cabinets: The cabinet surface and previous coating is what determines the cleaning product we choose for cleaning. For these cabinets we cleaned them with a Denatured Alcohol. The reason is because there was a lot of grease and dirt that needed to be removed and this product does exceptionally well.
- Make repairs: We try catch as many imperfections as possible. Things like scratches, divots, seams, damage, etc. We make these repairs with things like wood filler, spackeling, caulking, bono and more.
- Sanding: We use a dust free system to eliminate as unwanted dust when sanding. We mainly used a 220 grit when sanding for these, but at times had to use something a bit harder to get some problem areas.
- We caulked all the gaps and seams on these cabinets to elevate the look. The seams are things like the inset panel on each of the doors.
Time To Paint
The big mistake some will make is to paint too soon. All the prep work needs to be complete first and the cabinets need to be clean before even thinking about paint. Whatever is on the left on the surface will be highlighted once the paint goes on so the surface must be perfect.
Our first coat is a primer coat and for this we used one of our favorite products – Extreme Bond by Sherwin Williams. We choose a bonding primer because of the lacquer coating that was on the cabinets. The bonding primer adheres to the surface creating an acceptable painting surface for the finish coats.
For our top coats we go with the Emerald Urethane because of its durability and smooth finish. We choose this product because cabinets get a lot of wear and tear so they need a hard, durable finish to protect them.
Factory Finish
We hang our hats on our quality so it is no surprise our goal is to achieve the highest quality finish possible. we do this by using an HVLP sprayer which is the same type of sprayer used on car finishes. Our craftsman have been trained on this sprayer and are experts in the field.
If you are interested in getting a quote for your cabinet project you can schedule a FREE quote here.
