My husband and I are renovating our house and the kitchen cabinets are next on the list. They are raw wood cabinets that we are painting and installing ourselves. We have a paint sprayer we will use for the doors, but plan to hand roll the rest as the interior of the cabinets can't be painted.

Tell me your horror stories (and tips!) so that I don't screw up our kitchen. Best kind of paint? Best primer? Painting tips?

Sand, clean, clean, clean again. Spray everything with an HVLP.

What kind of wood?
Do you want to see wood grain when finished?

Beech wood cabinets. Not looking for any grain to show through.

i used this on a brushed mantle and it seemed to help.

we used the rustoleum cabinet transformation product which is available at the big box stores. took a couple of weeks since we have lots of cabinets but it was fairly painless. there is a dvd that comes with it that goes thru all the steps.

Replace them with cabinets already the color you want.

Cow Hop Ag said:

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i used this on a brushed mantle and it seemed to help.

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This will help if you use high quality brushes and paint. I mean high quality, not a little more than the cheap ones. A good finish on cabinets is not like painting a wall.

Painting cabinets well is time consuming and tedious. When I say clean, I mean you will have to make sure you get all of the oils off of all of the surfaces or you will end up with spots that will be hard to get off because latex and acrylics don't sand well.

Prime sand a bunch
Prime again and sand
Prime again and sand
Color
Sand
Color
Sand
Color and the grain should be gone

Sanding between primer coats will reveal haw much sanding and coating has to be done to remove wood grain in finished product

Floetrol is fine but an hvlp sprayer is more important

I painted my kitchen cabinets white this summer. It was quite the undertaking, but well worth it. I went to a Benjamin Moore paint store and took all the advice from the man that worked there. A gallon of primer and paint was about $100 total, but I had a lot left when I was done. After the great amount of research that I did, it was definitely the best. Good luck!

I scraped sanded & got my cabinets down as much as I could. If I were to do it again I would first of all wash all surfaces well with warm soapy water, sand with 180 grit until satisfied, prime, sand with 220, prime again (if they're a dark color before), sand again, then top coat. If happy with result, great, if not sand with 220, then add another coat. I recommend "less is more" with the top coat. You will have a better looking finish with several light coats than one heavy coat.

DO NOT USE LATEX PAINT.

As a matter of fact, dont use any paint. If you have to use paint, use BM Advance.

In my shop, we use Target Coatings Pigmented Lacquer exclusively for colors. They will match to any bm or sw color. It is best applied with a HVLP sprayer.

This stuff is waterborne, so it dries fast...like really fast.

Clean all your cabs thoroughly with tsp.

Sand evenly. Be delicate around the profiles, you dont want to accidentally round over a sharp edge...

In addition to target coatings pigmented lacquer, their hsf5000 primer/filler is awesome to work with.

If you have any questions, please dont hesitate to shoot me a pm.

Edit to add - if you insist on rolling, use either bm advance or valspar cabinet enamel, it has more open time to allow for that method of application. Get the 4" foam cabinet rollers from lowes.