Homeowners ask me all the time if they’ll still see the grain on painted cabinets, or whether they should just tear the old cabinets out and start fresh. Whether or not you’ll still see the grain is probably the number one factor that determines which direction their kitchen improvement project will take.
If you have outdated oak cabinets and want to update your kitchen, you have two choices: you can replace the cabinets at a significant cost, or you can have them painted, which is far quicker and much more economical. Therefore the question about seeing wood grain on painted cabinets isn’t just about aesthetics, but also about budget and whether a dreaded (and costly) cabinet replacement is necessary.
If homeowners can feel confident that they won’t see the grain on their painted cabinets, they usually choose to get them painted. And the deciding factor – whether to paint their cabinets, or tear out and replace them – comes down to the particular painting company’s methods and skill in hiding the grain before painting. It’s important to see samples of a cabinet painter’s work, to ensure they can fill the grain well, or your painting project won’t give you the look you want.
Three levels of wood grain
There are many wood species that are commonly used for cabinets and furniture, and depending on the grain level of each species, the process for achieving that smooth, factory-like finish will vary. From the cabinet painter’s perspective, what matters is how smooth the wood feels to start with. Most wood falls into one of three categories: light grain, medium/heavy grain, or knotted.
Light grain, or no textured grain at all
These types of wood cabinets are the easiest to paint and get a silky-smooth result. If your cabinets feel smooth to the touch already, they’re probably a fine-grained wood such as cherry or maple. They may have a visual pattern, but they’ll still feel smooth as a sheet of paper.
Medium and heavy grain
This group includes golden oak, red oak, hickory, and walnut. Perhaps because the grain pattern is so heavy and visually dominant on these woods, and because their stained color is so strong (usually some variation of dark orange), homeowners seem to be the most eager to either paint or replace these design offenders. Painting out that dark orange color will completely transform and refresh the look and feel of a kitchen, and some of our most dramatic “before and after” projects were painted over red or golden oak.
How do you know you have one of these types of cabinets? Besides the tell-tale orange stain color, these woods don’t always feel paper-smooth to the touch, and you can feel the texture of the grain if you run your fingers across a cabinet door.
Knotted woods like knotty alder
Almost all wood have natural dark spots and anomalies in some fashion. In species such as “knotty alder” and rustic hickory, you’ll see prevalent deep knots and even natural gashes in the wood, that are considered a design feature of the wood itself. The knots can be quite deep, almost like fissures, and give the wood a very distinctive look. Ironically, the rest of the wood surface, apart from the knots, can feel quite smooth.
Hiding the grain on painted cabinets
Most homeowners want their painted kitchen cabinets to look like new, like they were painted by the manufacturer with a factory finish that feels smooth to the touch. Otherwise, if you still see or feel the underlying grain underneath the layers of fresh paint, it’s a dead give-away that the cabinets were originally stained and then painted later, and not painted very well to boot. So the challenge for the professional cabinet painter is to make sure that the vast majority of the wood grain is undetectable after painting. How do you accomplish that?
If the cabinets are smooth to the touch already, the task is easy. Almost any competent painter can spray a fresh finish on maple cabinets, for example, and make them look good. (The key is that the finish be sprayed. You don’t want roller marks or brush strokes on your painted cabinets, which is a clear sign of an amateur or DIY painting project.)
For smooth cabinets, all the painter needs is a good bonding primer, which is designed not to fill grain, but to stick to the smooth surface reliably. Any small dings or dents from wear and tear that weren’t filled by primer can be filled in with wood filler products. Then you spray on the final color, and you have smooth, like-new cabinets in the color of your choice.
But if you have heavier-grained, more porous cabinets, such as oak, you need a way to fill the grain and get a smooth, paint-ready surface. We do this by applying multiple coats of primer with a high “solids” content, which is designed to settle in the grooves and pores. Then we sand the primed cabinets down with powder sanders with a fine-grit sandpaper. After the first coat of primer is applied and sanded, you can see filled grain quite dramatically, as in this photo of some cabinet doors being processed at our shop.
Then a second primer coat is applied and sanded, for a silky-smooth surface ready for the color coats.
Doing this removes 90 – 95% of the grain’s appearance, but it’s not a 100% fix over every square millimeter of the cabinet’s surface. Some minimal grain may still be visible up close and in some lighting conditions, usually on the curved areas around the raised panels in the center of the cabinet doors, or if the cabinet doors have rounded edges. To totally remove all appearances of grain, we would hand-apply a wood filler in between primer coats, over any areas that the high-solids primer didn’t take care of. In some extreme cases, multiple layers of filler are required. And each layer has to dry fully and be sanded smooth. Needless to say, this takes more time and labor.
[Related: See our complete cabinet painting process here, including video]
Is any of the grain still visible after being filled?
The vast majority of the time you won’t see any grain left at all. The flat areas of the cabinets (the doors and drawer fronts, plus the cabinet bases) are fully filled and end up paper-smooth by the time we’re done with them. This is more than enough to make your cabinets look amazing and totally transform your kitchen. Any minuscule grain that is still visible as a slight waviness on those curved areas or edges just isn’t an issue. But if you want ALL the grain removed, it can be done. It would just add to the cost of your project, to account for the extra time and labor required to hand-fill every last bit of grain.
Here’s an example, using one of our very own painted cabinet door samples. Like all our samples, this door is made of red oak, which is very porous and grainy, and was a commonly-used cabinet material for homes build during the past few decades.
The wood was very grainy but now it’s silky-smooth to the touch.
Here’s a closer shot, taken from the side so you can see the grain more closely.
If you zoom in, you can see tiny indentations either on the very edge of the door, or around the edge of the inset panel, where the grain wasn’t filled in 100%. This sample door is only 8 inches square, and you do have to zoom in quite a bit and pay close attention to see the indentations. That’s what we mean by our process achieving a gorgeous result, with 95% of the grain filled in (closer to 99%, really). Seen overall in a complete kitchen, the result would be beautiful, with any small areas of underlying grain on the rounded door edges barely noticeable unless someone was intentionally looking for grain up close.
Removing the grain on high-gloss painted cabinets
The stakes are higher if your grainy cabinets will be getting a high gloss finish. A high gloss sheen (sometimes called a “piano finish”) highlights any imperfections, so cabinets must be perfectly smooth. Here we painted one of our grainy oak sample doors in a high gloss grayish-black, as an example.
Filling grain on knotty alder cabinets
We can deal with knotty alder cabinets, but they come with greater challenges. Filling the actual grain on painted cabinets that are made of knotty alder isn’t a challenge, but those knots and fissures need extra care. Because of the depth of these knots, addressing them requires many filler applications before they’re finally filled to satisfaction. In some cases three or four manual applications of wood filler are needed, along with dry times in between each application. Again, all this adds to the cost of your project. The good news is that it’s much cheaper than replacing your cabinets would be!
Choosing the right painter for your grainy cabinets
We bring fully-painted sample cabinet doors to our estimates and consultations, just like the ones you’ve seen here. They’re all done on red oak or other heavy-grained wood, so that you can see the amount of grain that’s filled, and the level of smoothness to expect for your own cabinet painting project. We’re very proud of our smooth, lovely painted samples!
Hopefully this gives you a good sense of what to expect when you get your grainy cabinets painted. In our experience, the grain on painted cabinets is a non-issue, because it’s almost entirely eliminated and all anyone will see is the lovely, smooth new finish on your updated kitchen cabinets. The transformation is worth it!
