Paint or Replace My Kitchen Cabinets?

As a professional house painting company serving Muskegon, Michigan, and the surrounding areas, we paint many kitchens, focusing primarily on walls, ceilings, and trim. Lately, more and more people are considering not only having their walls painted but also their kitchen cabinetry.

Why Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets?

Painting your kitchen cabinets will provide you with significant savings, as your cabinets, although old, are well-built and in good shape. Your kitchen may still have beautiful door styles with intricate details that, if replaced today, would incur a significantly higher cost. When painted, they will expose the beautiful millwork that may have been hidden by the dark-colored stained wood. Since most kitchens were fitted with stained cabinets, such as the famous "Honey Oak," this can lock the kitchen into a different era. Revamping the colors throughout the rest of your home while keeping the old honey oak cabinets will leave your home in a style dilemma.

Famous "Honey Oak" Cabinets

What's The Process?

As professional painters, it seems like we spend 90% of our time preparing to apply paint. Proper surface preparation is the most important step in ensuring a long-lasting finish, especially when painting kitchen cabinets. At Werner Design Painting, these are the steps we take to ensure beautiful, long-lasting results:

Step 1:

We start by removing the cabinet doors and hardware. This allows us easy access to the cabinet boxes and face frames.

Step 2:

Clean, clean, clean! We use a degreaser to remove any hand oils, cooking fumes, and food prep splashes. We like to use the green scrub sponges.

Step 3:

Sand with a fine sandpaper. This with give the hard, smooth coating a profile which will allow the primer to properly adhere to the factory coating. We make sure not to miss hard-to-reach areas like inside corners and molding creases - this is where paint failures can occur.

Step 4:

Prime the doors and cabinet boxes. You might be thinking, "We sanded why is primer necessary?" Primer is necessary for two things: adhesion and stain-blocking. We use a special primer designed to bond to hard-to-stick-to surfaces and will also seal in any tannins that would bleed through a normal latex primer.

Step 5:

Topcoat with two coats of cabinet grade paint. Not all paints are created equal we use hard enamel paints that are designed to with stand the abuse that kitchen cabinets take.

Pro Tips:

1. We will remove all the hardware, doors, and drawer faces. The doors and drawer faces will be brought back to our shop to be prepped and painted there.

2. Be prepared to be without a kitchen for roughly a week. We can give you access to your sink and appliances; just let us know before we leave for the day.

3. All the walls, ceilings, floors, appliances, and counters will be masked off.

4. You do not have to empty your cabinets or drawers; all the door and drawer openings will be masked off. We do ask that if the cabinets are very full, ensure that the items are pushed back so we have enough space to install the masking.

5. The insides of the cabinets are not painted. There is really no benefit to painting the inside of the cabinets and would more than double the price of your project and your time spent without a kitchen.

6. Determine whether you want a sprayed finish or brushed finish. A brushed finish gives the cabinets a more traditional look with a slight texture, but don't expect a perfectly smooth finish. A spray finish will give the cabinets a completely smooth finish.

7. Make sure to be careful with the cabinets for the first month. The cabinet finish needs time to fully cure.

8. Caring for your newly painted cabinets is simple. Use a soft cloth, warm water, and dish soap.