Phase Two: Puttin' on the Paint

After we prepped our cabinets and sanded them down, we used de-glosser to make sure the paint would stick to the boards extra good.  Deglosser does the job of sanding, but for this project we wanted to be extra careful so we did both!  We used a cloth to wipe a thin coat of deglosser all over the cabinets.While we waited for the deglosser to dry we opened our beautiful can of Behr semi gloss enamel paint and primer in one in the lovely shade of ostrich.

Then we made what I’m thinking is a little mistake. Okay maybe a big mistake....but I assure you it wasn't disasterious. You see we added Floetrol to the paint.  This is a product used to help decrease brush stokes in the paint and makes the paint take longer to dry so you can finesse it so it is juuuust right.  It also makes the paint a bit thinner than normal.  Since our wooden cabinets had pretty deep wood grain, the thinner paint settled into the cracks easier causing the wood grain to become apparent.  This might have been a good product for wood that is flatter and you are worried about brush strokes.  In the end the painting method we used cut down on roller marks significantly where we had virtually none, so brush marks weren’t our issue.  What we did have however, is a paint job that took several more coats than we anticipated due to the thinness of the paint.      

We first used a typical roller to roll on nice thin layers of paint.  Afterwards we came through with a fine roller that looked like a sponge.  The fine roller doesn’t hold a lot of paint so you wouldn’t want to do your paint job with it….BUT rolling over your existing paint job helps smooth your paint out a ton! A 2 inch brush was used to help get into the corners and the tricky spots.  I used a small art brush to paint on the edge of the crown molding between the ceiling.       

After we put on 6 coats of paint onto the cabinets we could start getting our lives back to normal.  Meaning we could start to take all the plastic off the walls, floors, countertops etc.  The painting took 3-4 days to get all the coats in the kitchen on the cabinets, which felt like FOREVER for our kitchen to be out of commission.  But we did survive!       

Thankfully my pantry came out unscathed and un-dusty from the craziness of the kitchen painting situation.  I was glad that I had put plastic over that portion, but happy I took everything else out.  Having all my dishes and kitchen accessories in the dining room allowed me to have easy access to everything rather than peeling off the plastic every time I needed something.         

After all the plastic was gone I felt a little better and half way back to normal!  The next phase of the painting project is to put all the dishes back in the cupboards and finish painting the cabinet faces…..which feel like they are taking forever!  Check back in for more kitchen progress and happenings!