How to Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets in Six Easy Steps

The one thing I have always wanted in my forever home was a white kitchen. You know you have project passion when making the beautiful, dream kitchen you have always wanted, is something that brings actual tears to your eyes!

We first looked up ways that others had painted their kitchen cabinets to get an idea of what all we would need. After that we headed over to our local Home Depot to load up on supplies.

We already owned a paint sprayer and plastic tarp. After we took all the cabinet doors and drawer faces off, we emptied all the cabinets, peeled this horrible sticker liner out of every drawer and shelf, and got to work setting up the supplies so we could get started. We set up a space in our garage to paint, and to be honest I was quite impressed. We highly recommend doing this to avoid getting paint everywhere.

Before we could do anything we needed to go through the entire kitchen, and scrub them with soap and water. We wanted to clean up any food, grease or dust that had been stuck to surfaces.

After all of that, we were finally able to start priming. We used a “no sanding needed” primer, and with a 2 hour dry time this took us through an entire afternoon.

Finally we were able to put on our first layer of paint. The paint had a dry time of 4-8 hours. Since we had to flip every door and drawer face, it took two days to do both layers. However we made one major mistake that pushed us into another day! It was hard to keep the primer and paint separate since we poured both of them into separate jugs for the paint sprayer. Unfortunately we messed them up, and instead of putting on a second layer of paint…we did another layer of primer on top of the first layer of paint!

There were parts of this project we did not expect. Therefore there are some things that we learned and would pass on to anyone doing the same type of project.

• Do not rush the paint drying time. Most paint will leave a window of dry time on the directions. That can be a 2-4 hour expectancy between wait times. Our best tip is to wait the entire amount of time, or even better? Wait longer! The longer you wait, the better it will look, and the less likely it will be to ruin it!
• Tape everything! It can be really easy to get lazy with this step, but if you take the time to do it right away, the priming and painting will be much faster. The clean up will be much much easier too!
• When you are getting to the end, do not hurry because you are excited. Take the time to make sure you are putting the cabinet doors and drawer faces on the correct way! It is quickly very frustrating to almost be done, and then have to spend an additional few hours fixing everything you put on incorrectly!