The cheapest way to change a kitchen

Why most painted cabinets fail

Cabinet doors are the hardest surface in a house to paint. They get touched constantly, with wet hands, greasy hands, and the corner of a saucepan. They sit next to a heat source. They open and close thousands of times a year against another painted surface.

Almost every painted-cabinet horror story comes down to the same thing: not enough preparation. Doors that were scuffed instead of properly degreased and sanded. A primer that was never designed to bond to a factory finish. Paint that was rolled on in a kitchen instead of sprayed in a controlled space. Doors rehung before the finish had cured and immediately marked by their own hinges.

None of that is a problem with painting cabinets. It is a problem with rushing them. When the preparation is right, a sprayed cabinet finish is durable, uniform and genuinely hard to distinguish from a factory finish.

How we do it

1. Everything comes off

Doors, drawer fronts and hardware are removed and labelled. Nothing gets painted in place except the boxes and frames, which are masked properly.

2. Degrease, then sand, then degrease again

Kitchen cabinets carry years of cooking residue, and paint does not bond to that. This step is unglamorous, it takes the longest, and skipping it is the single most common reason a painted kitchen fails.

3. The right primer for the surface you actually have

A factory-finished door, a raw MDF door and an oak door with open grain all need different primers. Using one primer for everything is how you get adhesion failure on some doors and not others in the same kitchen.

4. Sprayed, not brushed

Doors are sprayed in a controlled environment, not rolled in your kitchen. That is what produces an even finish with no brush marks and no roller texture.

5. Proper cure time before rehanging

Paint is dry to touch long before it is cured. Rehanging doors too early is how you get hinge marks and doors that stick to their own frames. We wait.