How do the pros achieve a smooth, durable cabinet paint finish? In this video, CRATE founder and CEO Scott Monday answers the common question “How do I paint kitchen cabinets?” Additionally, Scott answers other common questions such as:
- How do I prepare cabinets for painting?
- What materials do I use to paint cabinets?
- How do I apply a smooth cabinet paint finish?
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Start Transcript
“Hey there, Scott Monday with Kitchen and Bath Crate. And today, I’m here in the Crate paint shop because I wanted to show you a story of how we refinish kitchen cabinets. It’s a question we get all the time when we talk with folks, of how do we turn these kind of dated, worn older cabinets into beautiful modern-day painted cabinets.
Now, this is a 1998 set of cabinets, a blonde oak set. And what we’re going to be doing is refinishing this over the course of this next week. So this door is looking pretty good, right? The reason we’re refinishing is because of doors like this. You can see the clear coat is failing, this has had some water and usage damage over the years, and really it’s just kind of a faded cabinet door. But if I show you this door box, you’ll see the real reason we’re refinishing this. This thing is a mess, it needs some help. Clear coat is failing, staining, denting, all those types of things are going to be addressed over the next couple of weeks. So we can’t wait to show you this story and how it turns out.
All right, so here we are after about a full day of work on these cabinets. What I want to do is show you the process we go through. So the first thing we do after cleaning the doors and drawers is we come through and we fill, and the product that we use is actually an Elmer wood filler product, so it’s really easy to work with, super easy to sand but very durable, and also prevents any type of expansion and contraction, so it’s a good, strong filler product. Our crews go ahead and fill in any corners or edges that have any types of cracks or nail holes or things like that, all of those get filled in.
Using an oscillating sander, we go ahead and come through and we sand the whole door. All of these cracks are now filled in, and it’s really starting to become a perfect substrate that we can begin the priming process with.
Hey there, Scott Monday here, and I want to show you the next level of the cabinet refinishing process. What I have right here isn’t a finished door. This is actually a door after the priming process. So what we do is we come through and we prime the door using a spray application. And as you can see, we have yet to caulk in all the various joints of this door. A common error that the DIYer makes, a lot of times, they’ll come in and they’ll caulk in their door when it’s still raw wood, as opposed to after priming. So what we do is we prime first, then we come through and caulk, which I’ll show you that result in the upcoming video, and that creates a really strong two-coat substrate upon which to apply our finished coat. The product we use for priming is this Gym Coat white lacquer sanding sealer. It’s a product that’s available in all sorts of different areas, but Kelly Moore is where we get it, and it’s a great product to use as a base level for your cabinet refinishing.
All right, so this is the final day of our cabinet refinishing process, and we’ve actually applied the finish coat to this drawer right here. So I want to walk you through the finish coat and actually the products we use for a finish coat here at Kitchen and Bath Crate. And so first of all, let me kind of explain. This is obviously a drawer box for a set of cabinets, and we treat the drawers just like we treat the doors, but we do something a little bit different because for drawer boxes, we actually refinish the interior of the drawer box as well. So, as the camera comes close, you’ll see an incredibly smooth finish that we produce through the cabinet refinishing process. There’s absolutely no brush marks because it’s only a spray application, and it’s a four-coat system that I’ll explain in just a minute.
So, really beautiful smooth finish coat, super durable, and it looks like this 25-year-old set of cabinets looks like it just came out of production with a new factory applied finish coat. Really cool results. So let me show you the products we use. This is actually one of two different finish coats we use. This is a Kelly Moore Durapoxy HP. The other product we use is Sherwin-Williams Industrial Pro, and we actually switch between those two products depending on the color paint chosen, the availability of the product, the tinting of the base and the paint. All those different factors our team here uses to determine which of the two products to choose for a particular set of cabinets.
And so that’s really the entire process from start to finish here in this story. Just to kind of recap, the first thing we do is we clean the cabinets. Then we sand and get us down to a raw wood type of situation. We apply two coats of lacquered primer, we caulk in all the joints and connection points, and things like that. Then two coats of finish for a four-coat system. If you’d like to see literally hundreds of Kitchen and Bath Crate projects, go to kbcrate.com. Or if you have questions about your project, give us a call. We’d love to chat with you at 888-995-7996. Thanks so much for watching.”
