Painting Oak Cabinets- Part 2
Posted by Wayne
To prepare for the messy job of spraying paint I hung plastic sheeting to seal off the painting area in the kitchen and also created a “painting room” in the unfinished basement in which I’d spray the cabinet doors. The “room” was made by stapling plastic sheeting to the floor joists above and I covered the floor with butcher paper.
My original thought on painting the doors was that I’d somehow hang all the doors from the floor joists but began to realize that this was just impractical to do in my basement. Instead I’d lean the doors against the walls in my sealed off space, spray them, and after they had dried I’d rotate them bottom side up for the second coat to make sure I was hitting all the sides (it was mostly the bottom of the door that I’d be missing on each coat as it was against the floor). Then I’d repeat with the backs of the doors. I was also doing a primer coat on each side. So for those doing the math, that’s three coats per side, or six total coats.
I bought a little white paint suit, head sock, rubber gloves, and respirator (absolute necessity) to protect myself from the paint and fumes as I’d be standing in a cloud of paint. Oil based paint is very tough to get off your skin, so I had to be completely protected. The head sock worked great the first time I used it, however after my first round of painting I set it down and I think the dog must have consumed it because I can’t find it to this day, and my wife swears she didn’t throw it away. After that I was forced to construct a turban out of an old tshirt and masking tape to protect my hair and ears. I wore goggles for the first couple of coats but they got so fogged up by the paint that I just stopped wearing them.
I prepared the primer and paint by adding a recommended amount of paint conditioner. I read that the paint conditioner makes for a better coat of paint, but really can’t say for sure if this helped or not. I mixed the paint very well with a stirring bit attached to my drill. I also poured the paint through a paper paint strainer into the reservoir of the sprayer. At first that didn’t seem necessary, but on later coats I began noticing that the strainer was indeed catching chunks of paint that probably would have clogged the sprayer.
As the primer was white, it gave me a good idea of how the finished cabinets would look. The primer spraying went very easy and looked fantastic (and this was only primer!). The key to good spraying is to keep the sprayer at a constant distance from the surface which you’re painting (about 6 inches) and flex your wrist as you paint so you’re not arcing and giving uneven coats. You can set the sprayer to spray either a horizontal line or a vertical spray. I set it to spray horizontally on the vertical pieces of the cabinets and a vertically on the horizontal pieces, that way I could cover a piece in one swipe of the sprayer.
The primer coat is 100% necessary. When I was doing the primer coat on the backs of the doors I ran out of paint about halfway through completing the last door, and decided it wasn’t worth running back upstairs and refilling for 5 seconds of spraying. That half of the door back didn’t take the following paint coats anywhere near as well as the rest of the doors, in fact it almost repelled the paint. Fortunately it is the back of a door and a door that is almost never used so it will never be noticed, but you really can tell the difference in the quality of the final product.
I finished the coat upstairs on the cabinet boxes and then carried my air compressor downstairs into the basement to do a primer coat on the drawers and doors. The whole painting process, for one coat, upstairs and downstairs, took about 45 minutes.
Cleaning up the oil based paint was a total pain in the butt and took at least the same amount of time as the painting after each coat. Latex paint cleans up with water but to clean oil based paint you have to use mineral spirits. Because I’d be using the spray gun over and over, I had to ensure that it was taken apart and meticulously cleaned each time, inside and out. After I had completely cleaned it, I’d put a little clean mineral spirits into the reservoir and connect it back up to the air compressor and do a few heavy sprays into a bunch of rags just to make sure all of the paint was completely out of the inner works.
The color of the prime coat looked great on the cabinets when it dried, but I noticed a bit of orange peeling on both the cabinets or doors. This told me that I was probably putting too much paint on as I sprayed, or even that the paint just wasn’t thin enough and was spraying small chunks instead of a paint mist. I did a pretty thorough sanding of both the cabinets and doors again to remove the orangepeel, thinned my paint down more with mineral spirits, carefully adjusted the sprayer’s flow rate, and made sure to move the sprayer quicker on the following coats. This worked much better and my orange peel problem disappeared and was replaced with nice smooth coats. I still did a light sanding between each coat as professionals recommend. An unfortunate fact is that you have to wait several days or more between coats of oil based paint, so six total rounds of painting took about a month.
I witnessed a very interesting occurrence on about the fourth coat of paint. As I was preparing for painting, I had my sprayer connected to the air compressor and it was standing on the floor. I was flipping some doors and noticed that the sprayer had fallen over. I picked it up and began painting. After a quick coat of the first couple of doors I set the sprayer down on the floor and it fell right over again. I quickly noticed that the concave bottom of the metal reservoir had become convex . The air pressure was blowing it up like a balloon! I quickly disconnected it from the air hose and released the air pressure from the reservoir. I still have no idea why this happened, but it would have been a huge paint bomb mess in my paint room if that reservoir had exploded. By pure coincidence, my dad had an old broken Husky brand sprayer in his garage and the reservoir fit into my sprayer perfectly so I didn’t have to buy a new one.
The painting overall went very well and the results were much much better than I had hoped for. The several smooth layers of sprayed paint made our cabinets look absolutely brand new, and the white color made the kitchen much brighter. The grain of the oak is still visible, but it looks like it came that way from the factory and I don’t even notice it (and if I don’t notice it after working on it for a month, no one will). I couldn’t wait to mount the doors onto the cabinets and see what the finished product looked like.
One thing that surprised me about this paint project was how little paint was used. It may have in small part due to the fact that I was thinning down the paint with mineral spirits and paint conditioner, but after all of the coats I only used about 3/5ths of a gallon of paint (and I’m sure a fair amount of that was waste from clean up). If these had been painted by hand with that many coats, I’m certain it wouldn’t look nearly as good, and it would have taken a lot more paint.
The bottom image was taken after all the painting of the cabinet boxes was complete. I still had several more coats to do on the doors so I taped up some butcher paper over our new window to protect it from any paint splatters while I was cleaning up in the sink. While I was painting in this area the window was covered with plastic sheeting.
Before
After
In the next installment I’ll talk about how I attached the finished doors to the cabinets with hidden european “cup” hinges.
Update: Click here to read about installing the european hinges
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