Painting Oak Cabinets- Part 1
Posted by Wayne
Figuring out what we were going to do with the honey oak cabinetry in the kitchen would determine whether or not we would bust our budget. There are three options I can think of when it comes to updating cabinetry:
1) Buy new cabinets- Obviously the most expensive option. Our cabinets are ugly, but still in good shape, so I didn’t see us replacing the cabinets without trying a cheaper option first. We didn’t even get a quote on new cabinets, but I’m guessing it would have been in the neighborhood of $5k.
2) Buy new cabinet doors and veneer or laminate the cabinet boxes with matching material- This was a much less expensive option, but still probably would have cost around $1200-1500. This was my first choice, but my wife got it in her head that any veneering or laminate on the cabinet boxes would start peeling off over time and claimed to have seen this. I totally disagreed, but was willing to try to save money first by going with option #3.
3) Paint the cabinets- This was by far the cheapest option (<$100) but most labor intensive. We had gotten pretty good results hand painting our bathroom cabinets which are made out of the same honey oak material, but those are not at eye level and it is a lot darker in the bathroom than the kitchen.
After reading about painting oak cabinets online, I wasn’t too optimistic about the potential results. A few people I read about said their cabinets turned out great, but most people seemed to report only decent results and several ‘pros’ said the equivalent of “don’t even bother”. The problem with oak cabinets, of course, is the deep grain patterns that are just too tough to cover up with paint, no matter how many coats you put on there. I tried and tried to envision what our cabinets would look like painted but still having the grain patterns and just couldn’t imagine it looking any good. The “pros” were probably right (except they weren’t at all).
I knew that spraying the paint on would give a smoother finish (no brush strokes), and I planned on renting a sprayer until I had the realization that this paint job would require several coats over a period of weeks. I had to buy a sprayer for the job. I was happy to learn that a good quality compressed Husky brand air sprayer (as opposed to a mechanical pump sprayer, which you wouldn’t want to use) only cost about $50. This type of sprayer you have to connect to an air compressor which really needs to have a good sized air reservoir to maintain the consistent air flow needed.
I wanted to use oil based paint because it dries a lot harder than latex. Going with oil based paint I think is a necessity for kitchen cabinetry so I wouldn’t have done it any other way, but oil based paint definitely isn’t fun to clean up.
Because the cabinets are likely to get food splattered on them I went with a high gloss paint because it is very easy to clean. Choosing a high gloss paint was a very tough decision to make because I knew it would make any imperfections in the final paint job more visible. In hindsight, I can’t believe I got talked into using high gloss paint at the time, but I’d make the same choice over knowing what I know now.
The first step in the painting process was to strip the kitchen of all the appliances and I also tore up the linoleum in the half of the kitchen that I’d be painting in. We removed the doors from the cabinets and the hinges from the doors. I’d be replacing all the hinges with a hidden European type hinge.
Before any of the painting could begin, the doors and cabinets had to be prepped for paint by cleaning and sanding them down. After 20 odd years the cabinets had acquired quite a nice coat of grease from all of the cooking happening around them. I scrubbed all of the cabinets down with a solution to remove the grease, and when I was satisfied that I had gotten most of the grease off I sanded everything down with some 22o grit sandpaper in a finish sander just like the one pictured below. This sander made pretty quick work of the flat areas of the doors and cabinets, but the doors also have rounded edges and woodwork where the sander wouldn’t work so I had to sand those areas by hand.
Sanding by hand was extremely tedious but it was absolutely necessary. On some doors, hardened grease was down in all the little corners and details of the door, and paint will not stick to anything with grease on it. Each door took probably 10 minutes of careful hand sanding and digging out little grease deposits in addition to the finish sander’s 5 minutes of work on the flat areas. We have 17 doors and 5 drawers, so the sanding accounted for no small amount of the time it took to refinish the cabinets.
Because installing European hinges on the doors would require the use of a drill press and possibly some rough handling, I decided I had better do that step before rather than after painting the doors.
The beauty of the European hinge is that is is hidden from sight when the door is closed, and this is because everything folds up and is concealed in a ‘cup’ that is part of the hinge and set into the wood of the door. This requires boring a 35mm hole into the back of the door at each hinge location. Doing research online I came to believe that I would need some type of jig to accurately bore these holes, but in reality this was much simpler (and cheaper). I found a European hinge kit at Home Depot that has a little plastic template that you place against the edge of the door and mark the exact position of the center of the hole you need to drill. The exact vertical positioning of these holes isn’t super important as you can match them up to the cabinets later, so I just located them where the screw holes of the old hinges were.
The hinge kit also came with the necessary 35mm boring bit. After I had marked the locations of the holes I used a drill press to drill into the doors to a depth of about 1/2″. Now the doors were ready for paint.
To spruce up the cabinet boxes a little bit my wife wanted me to add in some crown molding to the top of the upper cabinet boxes and also a piece of trim to the bottom of the upper cabinet boxes. I cut these pieces of trim with a chop saw and attached them with a small nail gun. This molding alone made a huge improvement in the appearance of the cabinets, and they were now ready for paint as well.
In part two I’ll talk about the actual painting of the cabinets.
Click here to continue to part 2
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