painting your kitchen cabinets

we started and finished this project so long ago.  let me say that painting your kitchen cabinets is not for the faint at heart.  you can certainly  hire someone to do this for you, but to save money my husband and i decided to do this ourselves.  my husband did most of the work and i love him dearly for the end result.  going black was a huge decision and a little risky but the end result is absolutely awesome and i couldn't be happier.  here is a break down of how we did it.

take all the cabinet doors off

sand down the doors and the shells.  this is a very important step.  you do not want to leave any finish on because the paint will not stick well.  in a kitchen you need a good base because of all the water and touching that goes on with cabinets.

then we applied two coats of primer if you are going dark tint the primer so you don't have to apply several coats of paint to cover a light shade of primer.  we also chose to spray on the paint to avoid the brush strokes look.  you can either get a sprayer attachment for your compressor which is what we did or you can buy and individual sprayer.

 

then we painted two coats of black paint.

to do the shells we taped off the whole kitchen and sprayed those as well.  it made a huge mess with over spray but the over spray did wipe off with a little elbow grease and soap.  you can take your shells off we just didn't want to mess with hanging them again.

we also applied wanes coating to the exposed exterior of the cabinets around the island and also on the upper cabinets.  this gave it a custom look as well as solved the problem of the outside of the cabinets not being paintable as they were not real wood.

once all was painted my husband applied three coats of polyurethane to the shells with a paint brush using long strokes, this did not leave any brush stroke marks and has given the cabinets a good protective layer from chipping.

once the shells were dry he hung all the doors back on and then applied three coats of polyurethane to them as well.

after all was dry we added our hardware and did the tile black splash.

the end result is a completely updated kitchen at the fraction of the cost one would have paid to have all new cabinets put in!