We have been in business for 24 years this coming November which we are very excited and proud of. We started out doing small apartment painting and slowly moved into doing more residential and commercial work as we learned the ropes. Most of our work is now focused on interior and exterior residential repaints which we truly love to do!
In the last few years we have had more and more requests to repaint cabinets. Most of the time customers call us that have older outdated kitchen or bathroom cabinets that they really don’t want to have to replace because of cost but they are tired of looking at them. Many homes built in the 1990’s in the Portland area had oak cabinets which make the home look a little outdated. If you decide to try to do it yourself it is one of the more difficult and time consuming tasks for a homeowner to take on.
Why are cabinets so difficult to paint? Well you can paint cabinets like you paint walls but the odds are it will look really bad or won’t hold up very well. You need to know what you are doing before starting a cabinet project so I will give you some of our tricks to make sure it goes well.
First of all you want to make sure you are using the right type of paint. You need to choose some type of enamel paint that will dry hard and take the abuse and cleaning that cabinets will need. Any normal paint will stay soft and scuff up very easily. If your cabinets have been painted previously and are in good condition you might be able to just paint them without a primer coat but you want to make sure they are clean, dull and dry before starting. This might require you to sand them or use a deglosser first so they are not too glossy.
If you cabinets are currently not painted you will want to apply a primer coat to seal in the previous stain or clear coat after you sand and clean them well. You want a primer that you can sand easily after you apply it as it will promote better adhesion and a nicer finished product. We prefer to take all the doors, drawers and hardware off of the cabinets so we can spray them for a finer finish. If you are painting them with a brush it can be very time consuming doing 1-2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint and you will still see brush marks on them.
If you hire Absolute Painting to paint your cabinets it will likely take us about a week or more to complete and we will completely mask off the surrounding areas so using your kitchen might be impossible. Taking all the right steps is critical so you don’t have a paint nightmare down the road. If you think painting cabinets is hard then try removing the paint from them.
If you need an estimate on cabinet painting or just advice on products to do it yourself please give us a call and we are happy to help.
Mike Hughes
Owner
