Kitchen Transformation: Painting the Doors White

After and during our cabinet painting we got down to it and started to paint the cabinet doors.  We decided to paint both sides of the cabinets to make the kitchen look more polished.  I know a lot of people decide to leave the insides the original color because “who is going to know”?  Well the answer to that is I will…… and it will bug me.  I started by sanding both sides of each door with the electric sander.  Wear your dust mask because this can be an unpleasant task.  I tried to sand down as much of the wood grain as I could….but since it was so deep some of it still popped through. 

Next we brought all of the doors downstairs where the painting would be happening.  You see we live in Minnesota and it is cold up here.  Although we could get away with sanding in the garage to keep all the dust out of the house, it was too cold to paint in the garage. 

Before we began to paint we rubbed down the doors with de-glosser to make sure the paint would go on without a hitch.

The brushes we used to apply paint were a regular roller, a foam roller, and a small brush.  We used the rollers on all the flat surfaces and edges and used the small brush to touch up the detailed areas.  We first applied the paint with the small brush and regular roller and rolled over it with the foam roller to even the paint out. 

After all that your doors should start looking all nice and white!  We did 6 coats on each door on each side due to our little paint problem.  We started with painting the backs of the doors first so when we flipped them to paint the front side any damage to the paint would not show on the outside.  It is recommended that you wait 5 days before flipping your doors to give the paint time to cure.  Even though the paint is dry to the touch, it takes 12 days to “cure” or fully harden.  Before the 12 days the paint acts just like latex in that if you pull at it, it will peel off like plastic.  This is a good tip to know if you are painting shelves or windowsills (like we were) that you need to keep weight off them for 2 weeks.  We waited 10 days to flip our doors and after we painted the other side we waited 12  to put them up.  We were worried that with all the jostling and what not that goes on when putting the doors up we wanted to be extra safe that nothing smudged or peeled in the re-instillation process.

Since our back room in our basement is a wee bit small it was a challenge to find spots for all the cabinets faces to dry between coats.  We had the most success with laying them on the floor and elevating them with small pieces of wood.  After all the coats were on it was just time to wait it out until everything was dry.