Painting Kitchen Cabinets - Client Job Follow Along

hey everybody welcome to another DIY painting tips video this video is of a kitchen I did a while ago where the homeowner didn't like how her cabinets matched her floor she'd really been wanting some white cabinets for a while so she hired me to come in and turn them white uh the countertops oh the sweetest dog in the world by the way just so kind sweet so I start off by cleaning the floor whenever I go into a new kitchen I I clean everything and then I go around all the edges with my frog tape and kind of edge everything off so that I can get the floor entirely prepped with uh Brown rosin paper so this is just me going around with my little uh one two inch mud knife and making sure that everything's nice and snug to the floor and uh nice and tight so there's nothing showing so here you can see how I go in around every little bit the dishwasher and everything just make sure it's perfect because any little Gap means paint on the floor that you're cleaning later and that is the last thing that you want so I'm just uh taping off the door to decide to get that done next is I clean off all the cabinets and just around the stove I like to use a little bit of dawn just to get that grease off you do have to make sure to really rinse the cabinets afterwards so you don't leave any residue from the soap behind but around the stoves the cabinets tend to be greasy and doesn't want the paint to bond or tape or anything like that so you really have to clean that up good here I'm just rolling out the brown rosin paper getting the floors covered so that they're nice and protected cutting it around everything and making sure everything is good this brown rosin paper does great for drips and everything it's nice and durable it it lasts all week without a problem if you do get a big spill on it you do got to pull it up right away make sure you don't give it time to bleed through and soak through that and that is my son he no longer paints with me but he spent a couple years painting with me and now he's off doing his own thing trying to figure his own stuff out so ah frog tape we do use frog tape on everything even after a week it pulls off floors really nice it um it's great for taping on the walls on painted trim on cabinets on Floors it doesn't leave any of that sticky residue behind it's all we use and we absolutely love it um here I'm using the zip wall poles to create a wall for a few cabinets that they wanted painted in their dining room so I use the zip walls and 12 foot plastic to just uh seal in my my painting area make sure that no overspray leaves and you have to be perfect with this any little gaps or airflow flowing from your spray area out to the rest of the house means you will dust it and that is no good here is the doorway from the garage into the kitchen the garage little porch area in the kitchen or mud room into the kitchen whatever you call it but here I'm just taping up some plastic and I'm going to take a sticky sided zipper place that right down the middle of this and cut through it and it creates a nice little zippered doorway for uh getting in and out of the kitchen foreign they actually work really good and we love them so you can have a nice sealed indoor and just in and out when you need to and you can kind of see through there we jumped forward in time a little bit and we're really starting to get this place prepped off nicely but okay here is the drying rack I brought along this is just a really simple homemade 75 drying rack so if you're painting your kitchens yourself this is a wonderful little thing to build it's just a few two by fours and some dowels and this is a pretty good sized kitchen and I was able to fit all the doors onto this drying rack I do have another video here on my channel I'll put a link to that here but you can go watch that and it gives you more detailed instructions on how to build this but it's very simple it's portable a couple of screws and then uh slide in the dowels and it's ready to go and that allows me to take off all the cabinet doors spray them and and lay them out on that drying rack so that they have a place to dry overnight here I'm just prepping off the chandelier use a nice wide piece of plastic pull it down around the bottom and up over the top and then wrap a little tape around it you can see how I kind of bag those up works really good because anything you don't prep will get dusted and here I'm putting up a few more zip walls to block off their living space from the kitchen it's one of those open kitchens so I got to make sure to build a few big walls with the plastic zip walls are wonderful if you don't have them I I'd have to check but there's something like 75 maybe a hundred dollars for a pack of four but they're absolutely great for any work you're doing just to wall off your space here we are numbering the cabinet uh hinges over lettering them for bottom Middle top and then we set them right inside the cabinet we take them off that way every hinge goes on exactly where it came off and this just helps everything go back as good as possible when we're done uh this is probably unnecessary but we just do it we label everything so that uh you know we can save hours of time we put the number of each door right inside the uh 35 millimeter hole and cover it with a little piece of tape so that when we're painting we don't lose those numbers and then we write that same number on a little piece of tape and put it right inside the cabinet and uh yeah that's how we make sure everything goes back where it's supposed to if you label everything good you know it might take what two hours or so maybe three to put a kitchen back together if you don't label it double or triple that number I have spent eight plus hours putting back a kitchen and just having a nightmare putting doors in the wrong place trying to figure out where they go and it definitely definitely saves you a lot of time that's my 3M uh handy masker or uh 3M masking machine whatever you call them absolutely uh wonderful little tool way to get your plastic um put up quickly and efficiently great for uh doing plastic on the inside of cabinets great for Windows exterior painting Windows stuff like that places where that big box of plastic isn't necessary and you need to be a little bit more precise with your plastic so I put one piece on where it's going to come out the long way either whether that's horizontally like this cabinet or sometimes it's a vertical and then I line the whole thing with tape and then just go around and carefully press that plastic up to the tape I just lined you can see I keep kind of that back lick lip of the tape up so that I can reach around and tuck it under just another little quick shot showing how I put in that plastic see this one is I'm putting it in uh vertically because it's shorter um a shorter distance from yeah trying to use the least amount of plastic as possible if you know what I'm saying plastic is uh costs money and everywhere you can save money is good my son taking a break talking with me refusing to take a break saying if you can't work and talk at the same time then you can't talk that's the rule I always like to say on our job sites here I'm prepping off the uh dishwasher it opened up the door prep off that door same way I do the inside of a cabinet and then close the door and that seems to work pretty darn good you can see sometimes those areas just take a lot of tape and that's just the way it is here is the inside of a cabinet that has uh kind of sliding not drawers but oh sliding shelves in it so I have to tuck it behind those brackets pull the plastic out and then I've just got a little bit of the bracket exposed and I just covered that with a little bit of tape and typically on something like this I gotta go in do a little touch up with a brush but that's that's every job there's always a little bit of brush touch up that you just have to deal with just the way it is um on this one I did decide to leave the drawers in just because we are do limited due to space and it wasn't practical to take everything out of the home and spray it off site and bring it back just because it was a long distance to this job and I thought leaving the drawers in and just prepping them and then going back in and brushing the back sides it it worked it looked great when I was done the homeowner didn't have a problem with it it created a little bit more work for me than I wanted to at the end of the day I did prep off those uh those rails too but you can just see how I did a the rest of it there but I kept them closed when I sprayed so then the back sides around the Box just had to be painted and done this is the scuff sand before the primer where we kind of break that surface a little bit get it nice and roughed up so that it's ready to accept that primer and really Bond so my son giving it a good sand down and here's just a quick walk through showing all of the prep work there's the numbers for those cabinets the drawers are going to be splurried in place we're starting to drop all of the doors into the drying rack and you can see it's just becoming a plastic world we have to prep off the ceiling just to make sure no overspray gets on the ceiling probably could have been a little bit more aggressive you'll see later on we actually brought that plastic the paper out further on the ceiling bounced around a little bit but you can see all the plastic inside the cabinets here and the window they're replacing the black back splash and the countertops and they said the countertops would probably be broken up busted up when they take them out so don't worry about prepping them off in hindsight it probably just would have prepped them off anyway but I did what the client said and it is what it is all right so end of day one day one was prep day we just spent the entire day getting everything prepped day two is prime day I like to use Smart Prime it's a hybrid primer it's an oil or a water encapsulated oil a hybrid I like it it bonds good it blocks tannins good it just uh does everything quite well uh I've used it for years now I use it on almost all my cabinet jobs I absolutely love it there's a few others I love um in select sticks is a great one I do like to use my full face mask pair of gloves keep the hands clean and uh here we are the table's all prepped off I thinned my primer down by 20 percent so if I've got 60 ounces of primer I'm going to put in 12 ounces of water get that all stirred in nicely and then I use an HVLP sprayer I use the Titan cap spray 115 this has been my go-to HVLP for years you can see all those layers of paint from hundreds of cabinets on here probably by now and uh yeah it still works like a charm what's nice is there's only a few pieces that are plastic on here that need to be replaced like that little hose and other than that almost nothing nothing ever gets replaced on this I've had it for years and years and just replaced that little hose every so often and the filters on the turbine which you can see in the lower left corner there and then once uh my son gets I start spraying usually and once he's ready we get a nice little system he feeds me doors and I spray and spray and spray got to protect those lungs I always shoot a little onto the brown paper make sure I got nice soft edges you can see here and that looks really good really nice fine atomization nice thick paint in the middle and that looks beautiful ready to get started grab my first door and you can see those little uh I don't know what you call them little triangle things under there keep the door off the table when you spray and shoot the edges rotate it shoot the other edges and I just shoot one one side at a time shoot it all flat and that just gives you more room for error you can spray it on a little thicker where if you spray them and they're hanging vertically you can get runs pretty easy so if you're not an experienced sprayer spraying flat spray them horizontally even if you are an experienced sprayer I've sprayed tons and I still love spraying fat flat because I can really layer on that paint and get a lot of paint on my doors so yep and then it's just walk grab one spray it put it back grab another and repeat the process for a while [Music] obviously won't show you all the doors just a couple here so you kind of get an idea of what goes into spraying these doors it's actually quite a simple process the actual painting is very easy it's the prep work it's all about the prep work if you don't prep it right that's where all your problems come from if you don't sand if you don't clean you won't get a good Bond if you don't prep off the floors everything you forget to prep is usually a cleaning job when you're done and you're usually kicking yourself in the butt you know saying why didn't I take an extra 10 minutes and prep this off now I've got to clean it repaint it do something and you know every job there's something there's always something you have to fix it's just the way it is my son's actually been helping me since he is about 12 13 years old he used to come out into the shop and just haul cabinet doors to me while I sprayed and uh he knows the process he just walks in knows exactly what to do or don't have to tell him anything it's great to have a helper like that just an old over-the-shoulder shot so you can see in real time it's slow I shoot a couple angles twist the door that way I get I don't have any um shadows in my spray just nice and slow and even get that coat uh primer on there get it looking good then let it settle and turn into a nice glass-like finish here is sped up again spraying all the boxes now and I don't know why I do this but when I'm spraying something big about halfway I almost always get bored I don't know if that's it or I feel like I'm not getting anywhere and I switch to the the opposite side and work my way to the middle there is no reason for this whatsoever I attribute it to boredom or something who knows it's just a habit and I do it to this day and I do it on everything that's a big big area like that I just do it you see me just changing the angle of the tip so that I can get down and shoot at different angles shoot a shoot a horizontal spray fan shoot a vertical spray fan just for whatever works for what I'm shooting and I sit and adjust that and there's a little uh lever to adjust the siphon tube on the inside too so if you tilt it at an angle you're always siphoning from the lowest point in the cup gun let's see do I switch see that I just stopped and I switched because uh I get bored too easily or something here's the other side you don't have to worry about it being perfectly even or anything remember this is just primer right now so with primer it's just about getting a good even coat or not you know a good coverage coat um on everything not leaving light spots ideally and they wanted the inside of this because there's a glass door there and um spraying the insides of cabinets is never fun because the overspray has nowhere to go but back in your face so if you spray the insides your cabinets just know you're gonna want you're gonna have to uh really work your hair in the shower because it comes right back in your face full face mask helps a lot but it's always in your hair and it's always dusted when you're done so spraying the drawers in place worked like I said if you're limited on Space you can absolutely get away with it no paint slips behind them it doesn't make a mess behind them but is it the most efficient thing in the world no if you have the space and can take them off that's probably going to be better every time but it definitely works and doesn't hurt the quality at all and you can see there is a vent cover under there and I wanted it white I wanted it to blend in no point getting a new one might as well just paint it oftentimes homeowners do like to put an accent color on their Center Island this home uh they did not I just did one this week where we have a nice deep blue on the center Island I did film that one as well so hopefully that'll be up here in the next week or so and uh you can see another kitchen being done much smaller kitchen and it was for a friend and uh I only had a couple days to do it and they had to uh uh have access to their kitchen for food and stuff during it so you'll see a few things I did a little bit different on that job to make sure that it worked for them so if you like this video make sure to subscribe and turn on your notifications so that when the next one goes up you got another wonderful video to watch priming is probably the easiest spraying because once you're spraying the top coat white on white it's a little bit harder to see what you're doing but uh yeah and priming is the most satisfying seeing everything change color seeing that big drastic change on the primer I'm sure I'll get plenty of comments about those countertops I'm sure they could have been saved or something in hindsight I wish uh yeah wish you would have prepped them no matter what the homeowner said but I didn't it is what it is so I'm sure uh someone could have saved him or something I'm sure that was wasteful and I regret that and I won't do it again and there it is everything is all primed you can see all the prep work that goes into this all of the priming it's uh and that's day two you know it looks like there's a missed spot up there Ryan that's okay I'll see it I'll see it and get it done the the big open space that's where the fridge goes where you can see all those lines in the spray um you know a little bit of uneven lines and stuff that's not a big deal when uh the two more top coats go on everything will even out and it'll look absolutely wonderful yep there's a miss spot always a few of those and I always miss a couple things I'm sure I found it before I left thank you all right day three this is where we come in and we sand down that primer get a nice smooth surface so that the top coat can lay like glass I also like to do all of my caulking after the primer because once everything's white you can see the cracks gaps every little thing better where on dark wood Golden Oak everything it can be really hard to see them sometimes you don't see every little thing where after the primer I feel like I can so I like to wait till after my primer do all of my caulking after the primer and then shoot the top coat I do use fine 3M sanding sponges uh after the primer and then extra fine in between the top coats the fine is a little too rough for going in between top coats but it's perfect for the primer because two top coats are still going on oh if you look at that ceiling you can see we got a lot more aggressive on prepping off that ceiling so that uh we don't get over spray on the ceiling I've learned that in the past you could overspray on the ceiling and you're repainting a ceiling for someone and that is not fun I use dap I get this at Home Depot they're 40-year wonderful stuff and the the caulk gun you see there is a 12 to 1 ratio caulk gun that means um it moves very little for each trigger pull and I take my time and I try to cut a really nice angle on these don't just Lop it off straight across cut it at an angle and then kind of shape that edge so that it can go in the corners really nice so I cut a little a shave a little bit off each side after I cut it so that it can really get down in those corners and just put the caulk in there perfectly I still go over it with a with a wet rag and really smooth it out can't really see it there other than my uh yeah so we sanded now we're gonna vacuum everything and I do that before the caulking I don't want to get any dust in the cult not a lot to see just vacuum everything there you go back to the 12 to 1. a regular caulk gun a cheap metal gun from Home Depot or whatever is uh four to one I believe and they will make a gigantic mess on these tiny little Fine Lines they are great for exteriors when you need a big fat bead of caulk or something but here you need a very fine little bit you just want to fill those gaps and cracks you know anywhere or two pieces of wood butt up against each other you want to fill that up and uh especially where the cabinets meet the wall and you can see it's a really fine bead [Music] but even if you're not good at cocking it use your wet rag and smooth it out no matter what I always smooth it out use that wet rag and make it perfect here I'm just caulking the crown I don't want any gaps in there any little crack or Gap once everything's white will show up as a shadow a black shadow and be a contrast on the white and it'll stand out like a sore thumb where on the dark cabinets it didn't show at all because it didn't contrast against the dark cabinet so now every little thing must be caught if you're painting a dark color that is not true you don't have to everything if I do a black accent on the center Island I don't even worry about it same with filling the Grain on Oak if you're doing a dark blue black anything like that filling the grain just it can still help looks looks maybe a little better but it's not nearly as necessary as filling the Grain on a uh oak cabinets that you plan on painting White so you can see with that little cut on the caulk gun it's uh nice and easy to put in that fine bead here is my top coat with you can't even see what I was using it's Benjamin Moore advance again I thin it down 20 with water just regular tap water it works wonderful you will read on the can it says only thin down to 10 percent you will not get a fine atomization in almost any HVLP gun at 10 20 seems to be the minimum and I believe they put that 10 on there just to protect themselves I've been with my uh Titan reps I've met with the Sherwin reps I've met with my Benjamin Moore reps ever nobody sticks to that 10 a lot of guys go far beyond so don't freak out 20 is is perfect and I've been doing this for years and years and years and I don't get callbacks due to failing pain that is not an issue I like to wear earplugs because the sprayer is loud and I also don't like when I'm spraying all the time and I'm the one holding the spray gun I don't like fumes getting into my brain that's a habit I picked up back when I used to shoot oils and lacquers more often now I use hybrids that are low VOC like Advance which is I'd have to check but I think it's 40 grams per liter uh vocs which is pretty low I might be a little off but it's under 50 which I believe qualifies it for a low VOC paint where the oils and lacquers are usually over 400 grams per liter and they make your eyes burn and you know those fumes get into your brain through your ears that's not something I want to subject my body to and I just keep the Habit because I'm spraying all the time as you can see it is harder to see that top coat over a white primer versus dark cabinets so you have to start spraying a little bit more by feel and make sure you have good light and sometimes you have to go you have to go back and always look at your work and that'll help get your feel you see me keep adjusting that's because I can see how much paint's coming out what it looks like and I'll adjust my my airflow my nozzle the amount of fluid coming out everything until it feels perfect and I can just get in a rhythm and no that uh I'm putting on the right amount of paint another thing I always like to top coat with satin I recommend to all of my clients to use a satin finish I don't like semi-gloss it's too shiny and anything less than satin is not shiny enough I find satin I all my clients seem to love the satin finish most all the cabinet painters I know satin trust me when I tell you don't use semi-gloss satin is gorgeous for cabinets and Furniture there's a place I'm sure for semi-gloss for certain things but cabinets satin looks wonderful you do always have to be careful not to bump your butt I have put a butt print in the wet cabinets behind me so I always have to be aware of where you are and where your hose is and everything like that and that wraps up day three got the first top coat on so day four the final coat our goal is always to do a cabin a set of cabinets in a week if we can get them done in four days great five days is typically normal day five is always where we come back we de-prep and spend the day doing little touch-ups and assembling the kitchen everything like that if I have to do a grain filler sometimes I can add a day but I usually just stay later on the first couple days putting the grain filler on and try to keep them all within five days here we're doing a little a very light sand and just checking that everything looks good on these doors and then before the final coat we clean uh everything we vacuum every little bit we want this to be a dust free environment so we definitely clean a lot more than we do before the first coat the first coat we clean it up we vacuum but second coat we get the places clean as possible here I am thinning it down 20 again stir that up and get all ready to spray we did skip over we didn't need more filming of spring but uh here is everything completely done there's all of our doors sitting out to dry the final coat is complete everything is nice and white and looking beautiful so you can see that drying rack in action there um worked wonderfully like I said about 75 dollars there you can kind of see a close-up that finish it laid down really nice and smooth really happy with how everything turned out on this job the client absolutely loved it so yeah I always tell my clients it's a good time to go test out all of the yeah you can see I did uh miss the top coat where the fridge went but we went and rolled that later on which the fridge went in there no one's ever gonna see it so it it just got rolled with a mini roller but like I was saying time for the clients to go try out all the restaurants in the area foreign reassembly and touch up one of my son's friends came along he has a buddy who's come out a few times when it's time to just put doors on and stuff like that I will take all the help I can get on reassembly day it's when you feel like you're done but it still takes eight hours just to clean up and get out of there reassembly is just a lot of tedious work and you have to look over every little thing you can see me with a mini roller over there in the corner doing the areas where it's just too hard to get the sprayer in my son putting the uh hinges back on the doors we uh have to keep our hands washed really good the whole time keep nice clean hands or wear gloves painting the back sides of those drawers like I told you not uh not the ideal way to do things there's there definitely would have been better to just take them off but it worked and having uh some brush Strokes on the back side of the drawers was not an issue here's just a light spot you're gonna have light spots it happens that's life and it's just an edge you have to go in do a little brush touch up and hopefully it's just a little spot here and there and you go in you look for anything you missed another light little Edge blend it in and that's about it for the touch up just going around a few last places here you can see the back sides there a little bit uh better view of what I had to do and it took about three coats to get the back sides of those drawers to look good and then after all the touch up on the cabinets is done it's time to take the brush and go around and touch up all the walls kind of all above the cabinets where the overspray got on the walls all of that needs to be repainted now so go in with the wall paint and cut in around the cabinet there brush it in and then we actually went in with a roller and re-rolled the walls after I cut everything in by hand so that again took two coats here's just cutting in between here um if you're good with a brush cutting it in works great if you're not good with the brush frog tape is your friend frog tape is wonderful um they had lights on the bottoms of their cabinets you can see here a lot of people want the bottoms painted white some people don't we left the bottoms unpainted at their request so and there we go and there is the final product looking all beautiful sadly the uh new countertops are not in but you can see how nice these cabinet doors turned out absolutely glass like they just look perfect and uh yeah I was really happy with how this project turned out it was Benjamin Moore Advanced for the top coat and zinser smart Prime for the primer we used an HVLP sprayer you can get cheap ones from Wagner they offer the Flex Seal 5000 my absolute favorite cheap sprayer I'll put a link in the description if you made it this far speaking of if you made it this far please throw a comment I would love to hear if anyone watched 36 minutes of this cabinet video that would blow my mind and I appreciate you so much if you did uh you're the people who make uh taking the extra time to film these and edit these and put them together so worth it if you have any questions leave a question in the comments below

Channel: DIY Painting and Refinishing

Views: 512,226

Keywords: Painting Kitchen Cabinets, Spraying Cabinets, Cabinet Painting, DIY Painting

Id: m4BLKPCt1YA

Length: 33min 57sec (2037 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 12 2022