God, I made such dumb mistakes the first time around...
Several years ago, I painted my kitchen cabinets using the Rust-oleum Cabinet Transformation kit,
and they look like CRAP!
They're all worn down at the handles, some of the paint has scratched off
or peeled off in some areas, you can very clearly see the brush strokes, and I'm even worried to clean
them because I'm afraid I'm going to wipe more of the paint off.
So i'm going to have to redo them. And as much as I love this kind of stuff,
this is one project I didn't want to have to redo.
Now a lot of people out there are going to say the kits are crap, and that may be true.
But I think there's some other things that I did wrong.
My biggest mistake, I think, was not sanding anything at all,
because the kit said you didn't have to.
So this time around, I am sanding the everloving Hell out of these things, because
I really want to make sure I get all of that old paint off of there, and get down to the glossy top coat.
Now if you're doing this project for the first time, and you're just painting over stained
wood with a clear top coat, you don't necessarily have to do this much sanding.
You just need to get the top coat scuffed up enough so that your primer and paint have a nice rough surface to adhere to.
By the time I got everything sanded well enough and everything clean enough
to be able to go to the next step, it took me about three solid days.
Last time, I just reused the same knobs, because I still liked them,
and cabinet hardware can be pretty expensive and I didn't want to spend the money.
But I noticed that behind the knobs is where the paint wore off the worst,
and I really just wanted to go for a different look this time around.
So I found some bar style handles that I liked,
and I pre-drilled the holes -- and made sure that they fit -- before I started painting.
Yay! It's painting day, finally! I'm so excited!
Last time, I did not use any primer at all, because the kit indicated that I didn't need to.
So this time around I'm definitely going to use one.
This one is Zinsser Bullseye 1-2-3. Zinsser also makes one called BIN which is fantastic.
What primer does is it forms a nice base coat over your wood, so that the paint has something good to adhere to,
and it allows you to do fewer top coats. It also provides a nice barrier between the wood...
...the oils in the wood...and your paint so that they don't seep through over time.
A number of years ago, I painted a little cabinet in my bathroom that I didn't use any primer on,
and you can absolutely see the knots of the wood through the paint.
In the last few years, it's become a very popular sales gimmick
to market your paint as having paint and primer in one can, so that you don't have to do
the extra step of adding primer, which saves you time right?
But it's actually BS.
Paint and primer are formulated for two entirely separate purposes,
so you have to put them on in layers.
If you don't, you're not going to get the same results.
The only time a paint and primer combo is really going to be useful
is if you're repainting something, like a wall, that's already been painted before.
Now these things I have here are REALLY helpful.
It's just a piece of scrap wood with a few nails driven through it.
You can either hammer them in, or if you're lucky enough to have a nail gun, use that.
This allows the door, while it's drying, to sit up off of your table so that it doesn't stick to anything.
Start by painting the back of your doors first, and then flip them over and do the front, and
the worst you'll have on the back is maybe four little pin pricks from these nail heads.
More than likely it won't even be visible, and if it is, then it'll be on the inside of the cabinet anyway.
Oh! This has turned out to be extremely handy!
I bought this Lazy Susan at my local Goodwill for about $3,
and what I did for this project was I took a couple of small
blocks of wood, and I hot glued them to the top, so that I could remove them easily later.
and then I covered the whole thing with paper.
And now I've got a nice space where my cabinet doors
actually sit up above it a little bit, so that I can paint around the edges very easily,
and I can just sit there and spin it as I'm working.
It's making things go by a LOT faster.
Another thing that's making this go a lot faster is using this roller.
Last time, I used a paint brush,
but not just a paint brush...
I used a chip brush, which is like the worst possible thing you can use.
They lose their bristles really easily, so I was constantly trying to pick the bristles out of the paint,
and they also left horrible, horrible brush strokes over the entire thing.
Okay, now for my top coat, I'm going to be using Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel.
Enamel paints will dry a little bit harder,
and be a lot more durable for something over the long haul, like your kitchen cabinets.
I understand that Benjamin Moore makes a good one of these,
and I've heard Valspar does as well.
Now real quick I want to talk about why I'm going with this paint,
as opposed to something else like chalk paint.
In the last few years, chalk paint has become hugely popular,
because of its promises of not having to sand or prime in order to get it to stick.
A lot of boutique paint companies have popped up around because of this,
and those folks are really good at internet marketing.
I've been approached by several of these companies who say:
"We'll send you some free paint, use it in a project, post it to all your social media pages.
And we'll also give you an 'affiliate link.'
Anyone who orders a product using that affiliate link, you'll get a little cut of it."
And so I'll listen, right up until the point where they say:
"And with our paint, there's no sanding and no priming!"
They sort of lure you in with these promises of no prep work, because let's face it:
nobody loves prep work.
What they're NOT telling you is that with chalk paint,
if you want it to be durable and long lasting and cleanable for something like furniture or kitchen cabinets,
you're going to have to do one of two things:
Either put three or four coats of top coat on top of the paint,
or put a coat of wax on it and reapply that wax periodically.
At which point, you haven't saved yourself any time or any money.
Now depending on your situation, chalk paint might be the better option for you.
Just know going into it that it's not necessarily going to be "easier."
I'm using these little mini rollers, which are velour and the velour goes all the way around
the tip, so that I can get into the edges really well, and they've been pretty awesome.
They recommended them to me at the Sherwin-Williams store, and I didn't really want to go for it at first
because I don't like being "sold" on stuff, but I gotta say,
they have been awesome.
All right, now I've gotten two coats on everything on here,
and all paints always say you have to do at least two coats, right?
I'm actually going to do a third coat though, because I want to make sure
that I have a nice consistent coverage on this, and like I said before, I really don't want
to ever have to do this again because this is a big job.
One other thing that I kind of wanted to mention to everybody is that
I have this big space where I can work and let everything sit and dry.
but if you're in a smaller space, or if you've got little kids, or cats that climb all over everything,
or you know, a shepherd or a retriever that sheds all the time,
you're going to want to make sure that you have a space where none of those folks are allowed to go for
a good week or two, while everything dries, otherwise your finishes are not going to come
out the way you want. You're going to have dog hair stuck to it or fingerprints all over it,
Okay, I think it's day 10 now on this project, although I didn't really count the last couple
of days that I've been letting these kind of just sit here and dry.
Enamel paint actually dries to the touch pretty quickly, like within the first few hours
you can actually touch them and handle them if you need to.
But it takes more like three or four weeks for it to really fully cure and harden.
So the longer you can let them sit, the better off you're gonna be.
I doubt I'm gonna be able to wait for another three or four weeks
to be able to hang them back up, but I'm gonna try to give it as long as I can.
And in the meantime I am gonna go ahead and start putting some of the hardware back on it
Oh here's another little bonehead thing that I did last time:
When I hung the cabinets back up, I noticed that there was suddenly a space in between
three sets of the cabinets that didn't have a little pillar in the middle.
And I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. Turns out -- I figured out three years later -- that
I actually have two different kinds of hinges. They look exactly alike, and they fit the exact
same holes, but one of them is adjustable, and the other one is not.
and I happen to have exactly 12 of the adjustable hinges, which is the exact number I need for those cabinets.
And it's done!
I did not wait the full three or four weeks to let it cure completely before I hung them back up.
I've instructed my family to go gentle on them for the next few weeks,
so we'll hope and see how well that works out.
I did, at the very end, have to add in some shims into these hinges,
because even though they're adjustable, I adjusted them as much as I possibly could,
and they still left a gap in between these two doors. So I just cut some shims out of a stir stick,
which happened to be just the thickness that I needed, and stuck them in there.
And now they meet just perfectly, which is really great.
The only thing at this point that's bugging me
is that on the fronts of these drawers,
you can see the spot where I filled in the hole from the drawer pull.
So I'm hoping that that doesn't bug me too badly, and I can just kind of get
used to that. Maybe at some point I'll fix it, but right now, I don't have any interest in doing that (laughing).
This project was really a lot more about a time investment than it was a money investment.
Because the whole thing really only cost me about 250 bucks, but it took about two weeks of work,
working almost every day, and some of those days were really long days.
So it's definitely not a "weekend project."
Sure does look nice though.
Now I just need to get myself some new appliances!
Did I forget to say anything Sally?
I don't know if you can see her, but my dog's got the zoomies behind me right now (laughing).
I'm just waiting for her to run up these stairs
Whup....
...and there she goes! (Laughing)
(very loud crow cawing nearby)
Dude!
(caws again)
(neighbor dog barks)
You too?
(more cawing) AHHHHH!!!
(Sally whining) Oh Sally!
(more cawing)
Nature is revolting against me.