A new kitchen for the price of paint and patience.

Why cabinet paint fails, and why ours does not

Kitchen cabinets are the hardest surface in a house to paint well. They get grabbed a hundred times a day, splashed with grease, wiped with cleaner, and bumped with pots. Most cabinet jobs that fail do so at the handles and the edges, and they fail because the prep was skipped.

Grease is the enemy. Years of cooking leave a film on the doors around the stove that you cannot see and paint cannot stick to. Every door, drawer front and box face gets degreased with a cleaner made for it, rinsed, then scuff sanded so the primer has something to grip.

Then the primer. Cabinets are usually oak, maple or a laminate, and each one wants a different bonding primer. Oak has open grain that shows through paint unless it is filled. Laminate needs a primer that sticks to plastic. Getting that step wrong is why a cabinet job can look fine on day one and chip by month six.

• Doors and drawers off, numbered, then sprayed flat
• Every surface degreased, then rinsed and scuff sanded
• Bonding primer matched to oak, maple or laminate
• Grain filled on oak where a smooth finish is wanted
• New hardware fitted or old hardware cleaned and put back

Doors off, boxes in place, kitchen still usable

Doors and drawer fronts come off, get numbered so each goes back where it came from, and get sprayed flat somewhere dust cannot land on them. Spraying flat is how you get a finish with no brush marks and no runs, and it is the difference between painted cabinets and cabinets that look painted.

The boxes stay on the wall. The face frames and the visible sides get masked off from the counters, the floor and the appliances, then finished in place. Your kitchen stays a kitchen through the job. The shelves are open for a few days and the doors come back once the finish has cured.

Curing takes longer than drying. A cabinet door feels dry to the touch in an hour and it is not ready to be slammed for a week or more. We tell you when the doors can go back on and when you can stop babying them, because a handle pressed into soft paint leaves a mark that never comes out.

Colors, sheens and what a kitchen can take

Cabinet finishes want a harder product than wall paint. A wall gets touched now and then. A cabinet door gets touched all day. The product goes on the estimate by name, and it is picked for hardness and for how it cleans, not for how it looks in the can.

White and off white are most of what we do, and they are also the colors that show every flaw in the prep. A dark navy island with white uppers is common. A color that reads soft on a small chip can read stark across a whole wall of doors, so look at the sample in the kitchen under your own lights before committing.

Sheen on cabinets is usually satin or semi gloss. Gloss shows fingerprints and every dent in the door. Flat cannot be cleaned. Satin is where most kitchens land, and semi gloss where somebody wants that older painted kitchen look.

Bathrooms, laundry rooms and built ins

Bathroom vanities are the same job in a smaller room with more moisture. The finish has to shrug off steam and water splashed at the sink base, so the product choice and the cure time matter as much as in a kitchen.

Laundry room cabinets, a built in bookcase, an entertainment center, a pantry wall. All of it is cabinet work, and it gets the same degrease, sand, prime and spray. Furniture painting is on our profile too, and a dresser or a table is the same process on a smaller piece.

Elvira Mondragon wrote that we "completely transformed my home" and that the team was "detail-oriented". Cabinets are the room where detail shows most, because you open those doors every single day.