Painting Oak Cabinets - Transform Your Kitchen!

the Wood Whisperer is sponsored by Powermatic and Ty Pond so you've got yourself some builder-grade oak cabinets that are perfectly functional there's nothing wrong with them but you just want them to look a little nicer one of the things people do to update them is give them a coat of paint right but there's a right and a wrong way to do it lots of products on the market I'm gonna show you what's most familiar to me as a furniture maker just as a disclaimer you might do some research and find some possibly better solutions out there but this is what I'm gonna do now story here my mom actually just moved into a condo the kitchen is nice the finishing touches are nice but she's not happy with the builder-grade cabinets and new cabinets are not in the budget right now we also don't want to necessarily buy new doors or build new doors for it so painting is what we're going to do but there's a little bit of prep work that goes into something like this because oak is an open poured wood so they have to decide if you want to just hit them with paint or if there's gonna be a poor filling process but either way it's a lot of work alright a lot of work and there are only two people on this planet who I would actually do this job for one is my mom and the other is Nicole maybe now I want you to look closely at this oak door we'll talk a little bit more about these pores and the deep open grain if you look closely with a clear finish sometimes you can see if you catch the light just right but it can be hard to see now when you paint this surface because of all the little deep green pockets poor pockets those indentations become a lot more obvious and this is why people pour fill you don't necessarily have to do it some people don't mind it you know my mom does she doesn't want to see it so let me show you an example of one that's been filled and one that hasn't now if we look closely at this door you can see a lot of the obvious green what happens is the paint goes onto the surface it doesn't necessarily penetrate real deep into those little green lines and while you could keep coating it with paint and try to build up and build build build it usually winds up telegraphing through the finish and you see all of these grain lines but if you do a poor fill it should look a little more like this here it's much more consistent we don't necessarily have all those little ravines and certainly from a distance it just looks like a nice solid clean panel so it gives you a much cleaner more contemporary look but again some people may like this look better totally up to you it's a vision whole thing do what you think is best but we're gonna do a poor fill and let me show you how it's done now there are a lot of pore filling products on the market what I like to use is timber mate wood filler it is a water-based sort of powdery kind of filler easy to spread easy to sand used other products and I keep coming back to this it's just so easy to use and usually you could do it in one coat this is actually something you would use to do repairs on wood it's a very sort of thick consistency but you dilute it with water until you end up with something like this that's got a little bit more of a pancake batter thing going on and what I have here is just a bunch that I've been using up and I put a little bit of dye in there and while it's a very ugly crazed green color this cabinet door is going to be a dark brown so I'm going with something that's in a darker color family and maybe that'll make it a little easier to coat my paint colors so I just put some on the surface and I'm gonna get a putty knife and I'm gonna spread it across the grain grain is running this way and if you go with the grain a lot of times you just kind of pull the stuff right back out after you put it in but going across or going at a slight diagonal like this will drive this putty down into the grain now I should also mention you've got face frames to do right so the cabinets that are on the walls it's up to you that's one shortcut you could take you could say well it's just a face frame most of its going to be covered by doors and drawers so I don't have to do a pour fill there it's up to you but the process would be the same now you do want to go right up to the edge where the panel meets the rail and style but I caution you to be careful there if you get too much of the schmutz underneath there you are going to have just kind of a weird look where there's some putty some not putty some putty and it doesn't look great so do your best to just kind of go right up to that edge and drag it in and I highly recommend if you have a small very thin putty knife bring it across here and just clean that out when you're done you can see a little bit goes a long way now you might be tempted to just do the panel but I highly recommend you do the frame as well because that can look bad too I'll show you a cool little trick here as we're going across getting this frame done it's okay to be messy you know see that little spill over that's fine we want that same thing on the outside profile now because we have a you know fairly complicated inner profile and a outside profile here the putty knife can kind of be more trouble than it's worth in here you could also gouge the wood so what I like to do is just take that little bit of extra material and use your finger and spread it across try not to get too much into the corners and into the inside corners like that that could be kind of a pain in the butt to sand later and it's really what you have to keep in mind everything you're doing right now is gonna be a problem in a few minutes when this dries and you have to sand it back so you know maybe do one learn some lessons and then apply what you've learned to the rest of them you might figure out some cool tricks to save yourself some work in the sanding process now it does set up and dry pretty quickly as that happens if you want you can come back over and scrape one more time and a lot of times it's a good way to save yourself some sanding later we're getting some of that excess off or if you're not comfortable doing that leave it alone it's very easy to sand this stuff later all right let's do our other style over here if you do some research you'll find there are some other products out there high build sprayable sort of things you could apply to to the wood you know via spray and then sand that stuff back this is a very manual way to do this it's a very DIY way to do it and that's okay something to keep in mind here is I'm really not shooting for absolute perfection I want to do something that's just better I want it to look better than it did I want to postpone the inevitable replacement of the cabinets will you know which will happen at some point in the future but if I could buy her five years ten years it's something like this that's what we're going for and you don't need absolute perfection for that but if you've got the skills and the materials to make it perfect then go for it now you can see how much time I'm spending on this already this is one door they multiply this over the course of twenty doors from drawers thirty depending on the size of your cabinets and this is why I say it is a lot of work this is not a weekend project I could tell you that much at least that's not a single weekend project now remember with the face frames I told you there was sort of a cheat opportunity where you don't necessarily have to pour fill the face frame itself here's another possible cheat opportunity you don't necessarily have to pour fill the inside face of the door totally up to you if you want to do it obviously it always looks better if you do but if you're short on time and you just really want it to look good from the outside and that's all that matters to you then only do the pour fill on the outside now within about an hour your panel should be ready to sand so it's a good idea to just do the pour fill on as many as you can and kind of batch them through this process and then start sanding them all at the same time now to do the sanding as a couple things I'm going to use I've got a random orbit sander you could certainly use a quarter sheet sand or just any kind of small sander to allow you to get most of the flat surfaces very gently you don't want to be too aggressive I've got a sanding block that's gonna be helpful a card scraper certainly four corners and things like that maybe even a chisel depending on your situation and of course sandpaper now I'm gonna use 180 or 220 kind of whatever I have I like to do the whole little trifold method where you fold it one time and then fold it another time on the inside and this way you have a couple of nice crisp Square and rigid edges that you could get right into the corners I also have one of these sanding profile so just kind of a flexible rubber material I think I got these from Rockler these are fantastic for getting into those rounded inside areas and also on the flats out here and a very important piece of equipment is a respirator or a dust mask you don't want to mess around with this stuff you don't want to breathe it the mask is not optional it's absolutely required so highly recommend you wear one of those all right so let's get to some sanding [Music] so that's a it's a pretty ugly looking door I mean if you do this right it really shouldn't look great the idea is all of that colored material goes down into the pores every time you see those dark spots that's the spot that was filled but you do kind of want to get back to the bare surface because we want to at least make sure that we've scuffed the original finish that was on here whether it was a lacquer or a poly something like that we want to scuff it a little bit so that you have that kind of mechanical tooth for your paint to bind to but essentially this is what you're going for now if you opted to not do a pore fill on the back side you at least want to make sure you scuff it up with that 180 grit and just get all I mean if there's little spots of gloss it's not that big of a deal but you want to just make sure it's kind of nice and even satin or matte look to it again giving us a nice surface for the paint to bind to now for the paint I'm gonna use general finishes milk paint and oddly enough it's not actually milk paint that's usually a powdered material that you mix with water this is an acrylic paint that is just kind of satiny matte looking and it gives the appearance of milk paint but gives you even more durability they also have a great selection of colors which is one of the main reasons we're using it because cabinets do get abused I'm gonna be using an additional top coat with a satin Sheen to it and that's going to give us more protection now when it comes to this painting and top coat business there are a lot of products out there that won't require a top coat at all do a little bit of research talk to someone at a paint store great products out there but I don't paint very often so sometimes when it comes time to add color to something I go with what I know and with what I'm comfortable with and this system will work and give my mom the protection she needs and the look she wants so that's what we're going for I'm gonna apply it with a HVLP gun if you don't have one of those you could certainly use a regular bristle brush or a foam brush or even a roller on some of those bigger panels you can get decent results with that too so let's load up the sprayer I like to dilute the paint about 25% with water and I use a two millimeter tip I start by spraying the back while general finishes milk paint isn't actually milk paint you can see how matte the dry film is very much like traditional milk paint after a few hours of dry time I flip the piece over and spray the front with two coats once that's dry I apply a clear coat of high-performance I dilute the finish by about 10% now where you go from here is pretty product specific so follow the manufacturer's instructions for things like the number of coats sanding between coats and a lot of it just depends on how much protection you want and how much of a film you want in the end so what I want to do here I really only need maybe one more coat you know HVLP does put down a decent amount of material so two coats is gonna do just fine and I've got some 320 grit sandpaper here and really all I'm looking to do is find any little dust nibs just give it a nice light sanding to clean it up smooth it out now this is really more tactile than visual I'm not too worried about how it looks I just want to make sure I don't have any grit or anything in the surface when you get to the edges and the profiles just be really really careful it's all too easy to dig through your finish and go right through the paint so only sand where you need to and then have a light touch while you do it and finally clean off all the dust with a vacuum or compressed air so here is our finished door you know not too bad it's absolutely not perfect but I think it's good enough I think my mom will be happy with it it's a nice satin finish with that clear coat on top that allows it to be clean you got to remember if you do something like general finishes milk paint that ends up as a matte finish matte finishes don't really hold up that well to cleaning they show scuff marks it's very obvious when stuff happens to it so something with a little bit of a sheen allows it to be cleaned very easily and overall you can see the poor film makes a big difference in how much of that grain you see in the final result I mean you could still tell it's made of wood do you see some of that grain but it's definitely not as obvious all right so I had a whole kitchen's worth of these doors and drawers to do in two different colors and while this really isn't a kitchen makeover video I do want to show you what it all looks like installed at my mom's house so let's go check it out so here's what it looked like before and here's the after the first thing I did was add a support strip to the top that allows me to attach some crown molding such a simple thing but it really makes a big difference in the final look of the kitchen from there I painted the face frames and the island by hand I really didn't want to spray inside the house so with a good quality brush you can end up with absolutely minimal brush marks here's Jay and I slogging through the poor filling process by the way this was Jays last project with me and he's heading back to Missouri it was a great year Jay I miss having you around so I painted the doors one color at a time starting with the upper linen color and then the dark chocolate for the lowers now I know some of you will take issue with painting wood and I get it but not all wood is created equal in fact you should see how much perfectly good wood they use just to build this place only to cover it in drywall but seriously this paint job updates the kitchen and extends the useful life of the cabinets by years in the end it's what my mom wanted and she's happy and that's all that matters you can do whatever you like with your cabinets when the time comes thanks for watching

Channel: The Wood Whisperer

Views: 2,163,202

Keywords: woodworking, wood, diy, furniture, maker, fine

Id: q3m2SBE2hgw

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020