7 Tips And Tricks For Painting Your Kitchen Cabinets in McLean, VA
In the course of remodeling your home, one area that you might want to consider is your kitchen — it’s a place people spend a lot of time and so it bears the occasional remodel.
When you’re looking to paint your kitchen cabinets, it’s a good idea to do the best work that you can with the tools and paint that you have — and having some good tips on your side is always a good thing.
With that being the case, here are seven tips and tricks for painting your kitchen cabinets in McLean, VA.
1. Sanding Before Painting
You will always do better when you’re painting any given surface if that surface is more smooth than not, and one way that you can achieve this kind of smoothing is to sand.
There are also some schools of thought that say that you should sand in between each coat (more on coats later), and if you find this to be useful, you certainly should.
In any case, you won’t want to go without sanding your kitchen cabinets at all.
2. Choose The Right Color With Paint Samples
There are many ways to select a good paint color for your kitchen cabinets, but one of the better ones involves getting paint samples from the paint store.
The reason this works better than getting paint swatches is that paint samples being applied in small amounts to your kitchen cabinets will let you see how the colors will look under different light conditions.
This is, in any case, much better than trying to just pick a color based on how it looks in the store.
3. De-grease To Achieve Better Results
If you are painting your kitchen cabinets for the first time, this will not be the case as they will be new in the kitchen and will not have had the opportunity to gather grease.
A kitchen cabinet that has been in the kitchen during normal use will naturally have some accumulation of grease on it.
You can most easily remove grease with a solution of trisodium phosphate — make sure to get it all off and then wipe the cabinets clean with a wet towel, of course allowing time afterward for the cabinets to dry.
Speaking of drying…
4. Always Allow Cabinets To Dry Before Applying Next Coat
When you’re painting your cabinets, you may be inclined to start painting the first coat of paint before you’ve even given your primer an opportunity to fully dry.
This would be a bit of a mistake — if your primer doesn’t get fully dry before you apply the next coat or if your first coat of paint doesn’t get fully dry before you apply the second coat, you may be looking at quite a mess.
The previous coat might even come up onto your paintbrush or your paint roller, which means that correction will be in order.
5. Remove Cabinet Doors And Drawers Before Painting
When you’re painting your kitchen cabinets, it’s important to always remove the doors and drawers before you paint them.
For one, these will get in the way while you are painting — get in the way of painting the rest of the cabinets.
Furthermore, they will be more difficult to paint as you won’t be able to paint them as easily as if they would be separate.
6. You Can Rearrange The Kitchen, Too
Painting your kitchen cabinets is a perfect opportunity for you to rearrange your kitchen.
After all, just because your kitchen looked good with the kitchen cabinets painted the way they were doesn’t mean that it will still look just as good when you newly paint it.
It could be that your new color choices mean that your kitchen will look better with your dishwasher in a different place, for example.
7. Invest In Good Paint Equipment
When you’re painting your kitchen cabinets, you’re going to need to make an effort to invest in good paint equipment — this is not the time to see what you can get from the dollar area of your local big box store.
A lower end paint roller, for example, can have bits of the nap that could come right off while you are painting — and then, of course, you would need to spend the time to remove that from the paint surface so that it wouldn’t stay on your kitchen cabinets.
Image Painting is a professional full-service residential & commercial painting contractor based in Falls Church, Virginia. We have served the Washington DC metropolitan area since 2003. You can click below to request an estimate.