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Winter is the best time to paint your cabinets, furniture, and anything else inside your home. You can’t do much painting on your exterior because it’s usually too cold or rainy to get a good finish. Sure, you can do it in the Summer, too, but you might as well do work outside when the weather is best for that and do your inside work while you’re stuck inside anyway.

Excellent Painters has a new cabinet and furniture painting technology that allows us to do the work in less time and with less hassle than ever before. We’re using a special new paint made to be eco-friendly with nano-technology and more pigment that allows us to skip several steps in the preparation phase and go straight to painting. This paint is water-based, has low VOCs, and little or no odor. The end result is a perfect satin smooth finish that’s hard as a rock and easy to clean. Or you can keep reading and learn how to do it yourself the old-fashioned way.

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Transform Your Kitchen

Painting your kitchen cabinets is one of the easiest and cheapest watts to completely transform your kitchen. You can go from a dreary dark wood finish on your cabinets to a lighter color such as white or yellow and suddenly your whole kitchen looks different and new! This is much cheaper than replacing those old cabinets and much quicker, too. It will only take a couple of days to paint your cabinets, but it might take a week or more to install new cabinets. A bucket of paint is always going to be much cheaper than the complex woodwork and craftsmanship required to make new cabinets. There’s a high probability that your old cabinets are still quite sturdy and only need a little TLC to make them look new again.

Different Kinds of Cabinets

There are a wide variety of cabinets out there. Most are made of wood, but some are plastic and some are made of metal. All of those can be painted. If you can scuff the surface of your old cabinets, then you can paint them. Oftentimes, even if you can’t scuff them, you can still paint them. Here’s how to paint your own cabinets, if you prefer to do it yourself instead of hiring seasoned professionals.
How to Paint Your Cabinets

Label Everything

If you’re going to paint your own cabinets instead of calling Excellent Painters, start by taking all the doors off. While you do this, label everything, so you get the right doors back on the right cabinets when you're done. They may look all the same now, but sometimes there are small differences with respect to size, shape, mounting, or handles that you might not notice. Better to be safe than sorry later. Just put a piece of tape with a number or letter on each door and then put another piece with the same marking on the inside of the cabinet. Do the same for drawers. They might all look the same, but they could be slightly different. Leave the drawers assembled. There’s no need to take them apart.

Clean Everything 

Wipe down all the surfaces you intend to paint. While you’re at it, this is a great time to thoroughly clean the insides of those cabinets and drawers as well. Use TSP (trisodium phosphate), available at your local hardware store to clean the surfaces you want to paint. This will strip any grease or dirt from the cabinets and leave a clean surface ready for painting.

Make Repairs

If your cabinets have holes or deep gouges, you can use filler to fill those up. This is the time to do that. Don’t fill the holes for your handles or other hardware, unless you are changing the placement of them or replacing them with new hardware that mounts into holes located in different positions. Oftentimes you can replace the hardware with something that is basically the same size and you won’t need to drill new holes or fill the old ones.

Cover Everything

The next steps get messy, so make sure you cover your countertops below the cabinets and maybe tape off the soffits above. If you will be refinishing cabinets that go all the way to the floor, put down a dropcloth there, too.

Prepare your Surfaces for Painting

Using a fine-grit sandpaper or sanding block, sand off a layer of the old finish. Sanding will rough up the surface and make it more amenable to receiving a layer of paint or primer. If y9ou try to paint over a surface that is coated with shellac or something similar, it might not stick well. Sand it with the grain. If the grain runs up and down, sand with an up and down motion.

Clean Up All the Dust

When you’re done sanding, clean up the dust and debris before you paint. Use a vacuum cleaner with a brush attachment to make this easier. If you leave dust all over your surfaces, the new paint will stick to that instead of the cabinets and then you’ll end up with a messy, ugly new finish.

Paint on Your Primer

Using a small brush for the detailed parts, apply your primer. Just like with the sanding, paint with the grain of the wood. This way, your brush strokes will blend in with the wood grain. You can use a small roller for the larger flat surfaces.

Now You Can Paint

Make sure you have chosen the right finish for your paint. Avoid high gloss because it shows fingerprints and other minor stuff too well. Also, avoid flat finishes as they can be harder to keep clean. Satin is a perfect finish. Smooth and easy to clean. Remember that you will probably be wiping down your cabinets for years to come. You will want your paint to last a long time and be easy to clean.

Paint With a Small Brush or Roller

Apply your paint much like you did your primer. Use a fine-tipped brush for the details and a small roller for larger flat surfaces. If you’re painting the interiors of the cabinets, start from the back and work your way forward. That means start painting with the back wall of the interior of the cabinet and the paint the sidewalls and finally the bottom surfaces. Remove the shelves and paint those with the cabinet doors.

Paint the Doors and Drawers

When painting/priming the doors, put them on small risers so you can get into all the edges and crevices.  Only paint the fronts of drawers, as paint can become sticky on the rollers or slides. Make sure you keep the labels nearby and try not to mix them up.

For extra protection, you can paint on a layer of shellac, or another clear coating to protect the paint.

Let the paint dry for as long as the paint manufacturer suggests. The last thing you want to do is load your food and dishes back into a cabinet that hasn’t completely dried.

Or Hire Professional Painters

If all that work seems like a huge waste of time and would likely create a mess in your kitchen for weeks on end, then hire some Excellent Painters. We have offices in Colorado and Bakersfield, CA Remember we can paint your cabinets quickly and therefore cheaper than the competition because we are using special eco-friendly, Low VOC, water-based paint that dries extra hard, so you can easily clean it a zillion times before you will need to re-paint it. Contact us right away to compare prices