As someone who understands the necessity of good interior design on a budget, I’ve wondered, “Should I paint my kitchen cabinets myself?” After all, there are plenty of online tutorials out there, making DIY cabinet painting look easy. And it’s tempting to just spend a few hundred dollars on paint, rather than a few thousand for a professional to do it. But are DIY kitchen cabinets a good idea? DIY cabinet painting can go seriously wrong, and sometimes you won’t realize it until your paint starts to flake off a few months later. Here’s what you need to know.
Problems with DIY cabinet painting
Painting the walls in your space is something you can do without drastic consequences. If you end up dripping paint on your floor, or with a wavy line where your wall meets the ceiling, these things can be fixed. Some cleaner, fresh paint, and you’re good to go.
Not so with DIY kitchen cabinets! A bad paint job here not only looks bad, it can actually reduce the value of your home. Cabinets are just too front-and-center to get away with a bad finish. Visible brush strokes or paint slopped on hardware won’t escape anyone’s notice. If your prep or materials aren’t satisfactory, your finish won’t last. And (even worse) it’ll have to be removed down the road when you hire a professional to repaint them properly, costing your extra time and money. Unless you have solid experience with a sprayer, you probably won’t achieve that silky-smooth finish you see in the DIY reels on TikTok or Instagram. Cabinets are just too much of an investment to paint them poorly.
Let’s look at the actual steps and time involved to paint kitchen cabinets well.
It takes a serious time commitment
To paint your kitchen cabinets in a manner comparable to a professional paint job could require over two hours of time per cabinet door or drawer if you’re going to do it right, and many more hours for your base cabinets. Most kitchens have at least 50 cabinet doors and drawers, just to put this in perspective. That means fifty individual pieces, at least, that need to be disassembled, cleaned, sanded, primed twice, had any cracks or dings filled, and painted twice. Not counting dry times in between the multiple coats of primer and paint.
Can you do all this in a weekend? Yes, if you have a tiny kitchen and take serious shortcuts that will be obvious to everyone. Even the smallest of kitchens can take our professional cabinet painters three days to properly finish, and that’s for two painters putting in 8-hour days with a hyper-efficient system honed by countless hours of practice.
It takes real gear
Our painters spray the paint finish with professional equipment, so the cabinet paint is never brushed or rolled. Brush marks and roller stipple are classic tell-tale signs of an amateur or DIY cabinet paint job. You can get yourself a quality sprayer and practice with it until you can get nice, even paint coverage without sags, drips, or runs, but it will take longer than you think. Not to mention masking off your work area thoroughly so that paint doesn’t get where you don’t want it to go. Tenting and masking an area requires being thorough and meticulous, or you might find dried paint that seeped under your taped edge and onto your floors or appliances.
Most DIY tutorials get around this problem by recommending that you roll or brush your finish. Again, this is difficult to do well. Take a look at any piece of furniture in your home and you won’t see a single sign of hand-applied paint or topcoat anywhere. Factory finishes are sprayed to get that gorgeous, silky-smooth look and feel. Can you hand-brush your home’s baseboards or window sills? Sure, and professional home painters do this all the time. But there is a trick to getting the paint to lay down and level out smoothly, and baseboards just aren’t subject to the same eye-level scrutiny as kitchen cabinets. With very thin coats, you can minimize brush strokes, but you won’t get that smooth lacquer feel.
And some serious painting skills
Speaking of lacquer, we use top-quality lacquer in almost all of our cabinet painting projects, because nothing beats lacquer for a smooth, beautiful, easy-to clean finish. But lacquer must be sprayed, it cannot be brushed or rolled. So if you’re going to brush your own cabinets, you have to use a good quality water-based trim or cabinet paint. They exist, and applying very thin coats is your best bet, but it just won’t look like a factory finish in the end. It might be fine for you, for your cabinets to look hand-brushed, but durability is a real factor, and of course any future home buyers might have second thoughts when they see amateur hand-painted cabinets in your kitchen or bath.
- Want to see the full process, including video? We write about it here.
It takes a 2-man crew of our professional painters (seasoned veteran painters who do hundreds of these projects a year) an average of 5 days to complete the entire process, longer for larger kitchens. Anyone who says you can paint your whole kitchen in one weekend by yourself is grossly misinformed or doing it wrong.
The actual steps involved
Disassembling your kitchen
Professional cabinet painters never paint cabinet pieces in place, that’s just asking for trouble (bad brushwork and paint ending up on your hinges, for starters). They also cover all surfaces that aren’t being painted with paper, plastic, and tape in preparation for the sprayed finish, and this step alone can suck up a full weekend if you’re not a pro.
Your cabinet hardware has to be removed – knobs, handles, drawer pulls, and hinges. Hinge placement and alignment can be finicky, so you need to indicate where each hinge goes, and also mark where the screws get aligned and tightened so that your doors close properly without rubbing against each other or leaving gaps. This takes time and patience.
Cleaning
You have to thoroughly clean your cabinets, but most people skimp on this. Grease and oils from cooking or washing dishes have a way of permeating cabinets, and can be a pain to truly remove. Extra care should be taken around the cooking area above, below, and to the sides of your stove, as well as the cabinets directly below your sink and near your trash can. Most nonprofessionals blow right past this step, figuring the sanding and priming will take care of kitchen grease. Not so!
Preliminary sanding
Next, we sand, but you’ve got to sand the right amount. You want to sand enough to rough up the surface a bit, but no so much you cut all the way through to the raw wood. This is probably the fastest of all the steps.
First primer layer
We apply the first coat of primer, then sand that. This is necessary for your finish coat to properly adhere to your cabinets and last you many years. If you have heavy-grained cabinets, this first primer layer also helps fill the grain. And now’s the time to fix any indentations or dents in your cabinets. You’ll be able to see them more easily when everything is primed, and filling them in will really help achieve a beautiful smooth finish once you’re done.
Minor surface repairs
We use a wood filler to fix any of those dings or cracks that occur over time. (In the photo above, all those red spots are the wood filler.) We don’t want to just paint over them, because even a freshly-painted dent or ding in your cabinets is still visible as a ding. On older cabinets that have been through a lot of wear and tear, this can take quite a while, but don’t skip this step. This is another tell-tale sign of an amateur paint job, just painting over any existing cabinet damage without fixing it first, in the hopes that fresh paint will hide it.
Second primer layer
The second coat of primer goes on, then we sand again to get ready for the finish coat. This second layer of primer goes over all the spots of wood filler, fills remaining grain, and gives you a perfectly smooth finish, ready for color.
Two coats of color
Now the exciting part happens! With everything finally disassembled, masked off, cleaned, sanded, primed, fixed, and primed again, it’s very rewarding to see the color get sprayed on. Again, we’re spraying here, to avoid brush strokes or roller stipple.
Putting everything back together
Now your freshly painted cabinet pieces get reassembled, hardware put on, and hinges aligned. (This is also a slow and careful process.) The area gets the masking paper and plastic removed carefully, to keep from peeling off the paint on your walls, for example. And everything is cleaned up beautifully. This is the “big reveal”, and it’s soooo satisfying!
What most DIYers miss
There are certain parts of the cabinet painting process that most DIYers tend to struggle with.
Brushing or rolling your finish, rather than spraying
Spraying is intimidating to most homeowners, with good reason. There’s a serious learning curve to spraying well, to get an even coat with any drips or runs, especially on parts that aren’t just laid down flat on a work surface, like your cabinet boxes. Plus in order to spray, you have to tent and mask everything off, and deal with unfamiliar gear like sprayers and respirators. It’s worth it in the end, but feels like just more hard work in the beginning.
So, many homeowners opt for brushing and rolling, and that’s what most DIY tutorials advise. At least disassemble your cabinets so that you’re not leaving tell-tale brush strokes around your cabinet hinges or hardware. And practice leaving a smooth, level finish. This is the most critical part of any DIY cabinet painting project, and takes time and effort to achieve. Otherwise those brushstrokes won’t level out and will dry in place permanently.
Disassembling and masking in a hurry
This is another step where it’s critical to take your time.
If you’re spraying, you have to tent off and mask everything so tightly that paint won’t seep under any tape edges, or so you won’t find overspray on your kitchen ceiling. Sometimes you won’t notice this until you’ve finished and are removing all the masking paper and plastic, when it’s too late, and now you have to scrub paint off your floors or repaint your ceiling because your touch-up paint doesn’t match.
Even if you’re not spraying, you’re still (hopefully) disassembling your kitchen. Take the time to label everything properly! Every hinge has to be labeled with where it goes, and every door and drawer front. As anyone who has assembled Ikea furniture knows, hinges have several screws that need to be properly placed and aligned for the doors to close properly. When you’ve taken off forty hinges and now have to put them back, you need to know you’re placing them exactly right, right down to how much to tighten the adjustment screws.
Thinking it won’t matter if your cabinets look hand-painted
Unless you’re in your “forever home”, you’ll probably sell your house someday. Nothing is more off-putting to potential buyers than an amateur paint job on a home’s kitchen cabinets. They know they’ll have to pay a pro to repaint them, and there are just too many other homes on the market with beautiful, professionally painted cabinets to choose from. And even if you’re not planning on moving, seeing visible brushstrokes right at eye level every day will eventually grate on your nerves (or your family’s).
FAQs
Should cabinet doors and drawers be removed before painting, or can they be painted in place?
If you’re going to spray your cabinets, you have to disassemble them first, and spraying is the only way to get a smooth, beautiful, professional-quality finish. Some fly-by-night painters might try to spray them in place, but that entails masking off the cabinet hinges so carefully that you can’t see any missed spots where the paint didn’t get to, once you’ve untaped the hinges. Not to mention that it’s harder to properly clean and sand your cabinets when they’re hanging, and skimping on prep is never wise. Not just for looks but for longevity and durability, it’s important to remove the cabinet doors and drawers first, then prep and paint them properly.
What is the best paint and finish for kitchen cabinets to ensure durability and easy cleaning?
If you’re not spraying, get a cabinet paint that is enamel grade. Oil-based paint is better than latex for durability, but far more difficult to work with. It’s hard to clean up after working with oil, because you can’t use soap and water, only paint thinner, which is a hazardous material and can’t just be poured down the drain. Plus it’s lingeringly smelly, loaded with VOC’s, and takes 30 days to fully cure. This means you can easily damage it before that cure time is up. Unless you’re prepared to not touch your cabinets for 30 days, a water-based enamel-grade paint is best.
Since we spray our finishes, we use lacquer in a color and sheen of the client’s choice. (No, lacquer doesn’t have to be high-gloss. Most of the cabinet finishes we do are in a satin sheen, which has a soft, lovely finish and is easy to clean.)
However, the use of this product really is strictly for professionals. It takes a high level of skill and industrial-grade protection to use lacquer. A pro painter is used to working with this, but it’s not a DIY material.
Should I paint my kitchen cabinets, or hire a professional to do them?
Painting kitchen cabinets is vastly more complicated, more aggravating, and much more expensive to fix than just painting a wall. For most people, their home is their greatest asset, and the kitchen is front and center in how the home feels and functions. Poorly painted cabinets should be a non-starter.
Carefully consider the value and availability of your time, your knowledge and skills, and what happens if you give up half way through. What might take a professional painter a few days to do, could take a homeowner weeks. We’ve heard the horror stories.
And hiring a professional painter to fix your botched attempt can end up costing more than if you had just called in a reputable company to begin with. We’ve been called many times to fix poorly-done DIY kitchen cabinets, and I always feel terrible for the poor homeowner who wasted all that time and effort and now has to pay the pros thousands of dollars to fix it. In the vast majority of cases, the answer to “should I paint my kitchen cabinets myself” is a resounding No!
