How To: Painting The Kitchen Cabinets

I showed you the kitchen cabinet reveal and now I'm gonna tell you how we did it.  We used a Cabinet Transformations Kit from Rustoleum.  The kit allows you to paint your cabinets without sanding.  The color kit we chose was chocolate.  It's the same one we used to transform the master bathroom cabinets as well.

The kit contains:

Instructional booklet and DVD

Deglosser

Bond Coat

Decorative Glaze

Protective Top Coat

Glazing Cloth

Scrub pads

Stir sticks

You also need:

Paint brushes

Drop cloths

Disposable gloves
Screwdriver

First remove all the doors and drawers from the frame.  I laid the doors out in the garage and kept the drawers inside.  The kit comes with a deglosser that takes the finish off the fronts.  You want to take as much shine off as possible for the base coat to adhere well.  The kit comes with scrub pads but I bought more since we used the previous ones in the bathroom.

Pour a generous amount of deglosser on the scrub pad and vigorously scrub each door and drawer front.  You'll really work your muscles during this step.

During this step I also filled all the nail holes with nail filler since I was changing the hardware.

The next step is the base coat.  The kit says to uses a brush to paint on the coats instead of rolling or spraying.  You want to paint lines if you are going to apply the glaze.  The lines give the glaze something to hold onto.  I wanted the back and front of the doors painted so I started with the back.  Apply first coat and allow to dry a couple hours before applying the second coat.  After the backs are dry, flip and repeat first and second coats on the fronts.

You will need to degloss and paint 2 coats of the base coat on the frame as well.

I removed the drawers and sat them on the counter.  I just allowed the face to hang over the counter so I could apply to all sides.  Since I still had to feed the family during the week, I placed the drawers back in the frame and just left them pulled them out slightly so they could dry.  You can see where I did this on the drawers along the window side.

The next step is the optional glaze.  The glaze makes the paint a little darker and allows you to add a wood tone to the finish instead of just the brown paint.

Here's the brown paint dry.

Apply the glaze.  It goes on like the paint but after a few minutes it separates and looks like this.

Using the supplied cloths, wipe away as much glaze as you like to create the look you want.  I wanted the cabinets darker so I left more glaze on and the wood tone looks deeper.  Allow the glaze to dry 12 hours before applying the final clear coat.

The instructions say to allow the clear coat 12 hours to dry before putting on hardware and attaching back on frame and 24 hours before full function of the kitchen.  We didn't have a problem with this since we were working on it at night and the cabinets had until the next day after work to dry.  I would highly recommend waiting for each coat to dry and using the kitchen only if you have to.  It would be a waste to go through all the work only to mess it up at the end.

I would definitely say this kit is well worth it.  A little time and patience and you get a beautiful outcome.  Although I did mention to hubby if we want to change the cabinet color in the future, he will just have to buy me new ones, I'm not doing this again.