painted white PART 3 - painting
3:03 PM |
| Forgive my pictures. When I was taking pictures I hadn't planned on doing this blog so some of the pictures don't match SUPER well with the topic. This is when I was installing the backsplash myself (thanks YouTube) but it perfectly illustrates the existing solid wood, alder cabinet frames that we painted white - sans the doors. |
You're FINALLY ready to paint. Your cabinets are where you want them, you've picked a color and you're ready.
Just HOW are you going to paint your cabinets? Are you going to use a brush, roller or paint sprayer? Did you sand your cabinets if there was an existing paint or stain? Are you going to prime them first? Dang it that you can't just slap some paint on the fronts and call it good. Well, you can but "good" probably isn't what you'll be calling it if you do that.
First things first.
The kind of treatment your cabinets need depends on what kind of cabinets you have. Before you sand or paint, determine what kind of cabinet doors you have. Here are just a few examples of cabinet door types...
| Solid wood - just as the term implies, it's solid homogeneous wood, all the way through. The only variation might be boards or panels that are several pieces of solid wood joined together. |
| Particle board - an engineered wood product that's made from wood chips and particles that are combined with an adhesive and fused together into boards and panels. Particle board makes up a large percentage of the materials used in today's cabinetry, from the panels that make up the boxes to shelving. |
| Medium density fiberboard (MDF) - another engineered wood product that's made up of wood fibers. The fibers are combined with an adhesive under pressure and formed into boards and panels. MDF has a finer texture than particle board and is denser and heavier than particle board. It's used in cabinet doors, shelves and cabinet boxes. |
| Plywood - yet another engineered wood product but one that's probably most familiar to people. It's made up of thin wood "plies" or layers of wood that are glued together in a sandwich form. Usually the plies are oriented with their grain direction at varying angles with respect to each other to give the board or panel more rigidity and stability. Plywood is used for shelving, doors and cabinet boxes. |
Melamine - another plastic-based product that's also used to cover cabinet surfaces. It's a popular material for covering particle board panels that are used in making cabinet boxes. One type of construction you may see involves cabinet boxes made with melamine and wood veneer over particle board. The melamine is on the inside part of the cabinet and the wood veneer is on the outside of the cabinet box.
Thermofoil - a thin vinyl film that's used to cover cabinet boxes, doors and drawer fronts. The vinyl usually starts as a rigid film that's then heated and formed over the substrate material (such as cabinet door made from MDF). You'll usually encounter the term "thermofoil cabinets" which implies cabinets that are covered with the thermofoil material (the base material will usually be one of the engineered wood products).
The good news here is that most people probably have doors that can be sanded and painted. I would have you use CAUTION if your doors are made with plastic laminate, melamine or thermofoil as those materials won't take to paint very well. There could be a primer that will allow those materials to accept paint but you'd need to ask a painting professional their advice.
The other bit of good news is that 99% of cabinet "boxes" will be framed with solid wood and are perfect for priming and painting or staining.
Sanding and Priming
Primers and paint have come a long way in recent years. In days of yore you'd have to thoroughly sand each cabinet door and frame before even considering putting paint and primer on them. While I do think sanding a little bit is a good idea, it is no longer necessary to get your doors naked.
If your existing doors have been stained or glazed, I suggest a primer with a stain blocker (Kilz for example). If you just put paint onto the cabinets there is a good chance that in not too many years to come the stain or glaze will begin to seep through the paint and all your work will have been for naught.
Let me just plug refacing your doors here again. It's the BEST idea in all the land! Just think, you'll save yourself the laborious steps of sanding and priming.
Painting method
In a perfect world you would be able to use a paint sprayer to prime and paint your doors and frames. This is VERY labor intensive in itself because unless you are installing all new cabinets and can paint them off site, you're going to need to "tent" your room. You'd need to cover your floors with paper or plastic and tape everything down. You'll also need to cover all of your walls and lastly, use plastic to make a tent in the room where you're using the paint sprayer. You also need to be sure that everything is securely taped and weighted down because the paint sprayer uses air - which blows everything to high heaven.
Because this is so labor intensive I suggest hand painting your cabinet frames (you won't see much of those anyway) and using a paint sprayer for the doors.
In our case, we have an unfinished basement and my husband was able to set up a paint room in the basement - this could also be done in a garage. He simply stapled some plastic sheeting to the ceiling and walls and taped paper onto the floor and set up the sprayer in the "paint room".
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| You're trying to avoid this ugly mess by thinning your paint and sanding in between each and every coat. |
Once all of your beautiful doors are finally painted, consider putting on a few coats of polyurethane or even better, polyacrylic (polyacrylic doesn't yellow like polyurethane does). If you're thinking shiny, glossy clear coating, think again. They make matte finish coatings that will save your paint, make your cabinets easier to clean and hold up over time.
Up Next: the finishing touches
A big thanks to www.home-style-choices.com for some of the content on cabinet construction Please visit them for an in depth explanation on total cabinet construction.
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