Tips to Painting Kitchen Cabinets Successfully

You don’t need to be a chef or a housewife to realize the importance of kitchen cabinets. If you even try to make a pot of tea of a cup of coffee for breakfast you will be grateful for the cabinet just above the stove that stores the packet of coffee or the jar of sugar.

However, the kitchen cabinet stores much more than coffee or sugar. Spices, oil, cutlery, utensils and even cleaning agents are stashed inside. This multipurpose nature of cabinets results in opening and closing them a million times a day.

In the morning when you reach out for the butter knife you smear a little butter on to the wood beside the handle area. While cooking lunch you add a little olive oil and pepper to this. In the evening a few biscuit crumbs stick on to the earlier ingredients. These are complimented with tiny shreds of beef when you make the casserole for dinner.

Other than that the heat, oil, spices and dust in the air add to the grimy coating on your precious kitchen cabinet. After a few months it looks like a trash can hung from the wall. However, this state is not exclusive to your kitchen. Every kitchen cabinet is subjected to such torture.

Therefore, it is up to you to return the favor and clean it up once in a while. Sometimes, even during the cleaning process the surface coating (paint, varnish or even lacquer) is corroded away. Painting it once in every eighteen months should be good enough to preserve some of its respect.

Follow these guidelines before using that paintbrush lying beside you:

Clean the surface of the cabinets free of dust, oil, remnants of food particles, grime and other such rubbish.
Decide whether you want to paint it a different color from the existing one.
If the cabinet is varnished, find out what you should do before painting it.
If there is paint on the surface, rub it off gently with sand paper. Don’t worry about leaving patches of wood in different shades and smoothness.
Use a 2.5 or 3 inch brush to paint. Apply thin coats to get a smooth finish.

A pneumatic spray works the best to get a glassy finish to you paint.