Cottage Kitchen Makeover: Prepping and Priming
The kitchen makeover is well underway at the cottage, and today I’m sharing our process for preparing and priming the cabinets for paint.
Where appropriate, I’ll share specific products I used to accomplish the tasks.
In choosing a white paint, I was aware that preparing the cabinets would be the most important part of the project in order to ensure proper paint adhesion and finish.
Label everything.
Before I did anything, I removed all the doors and hardware. This next step is important: Label everything. Label all the doors and where each piece of hardware originated. Especially in old home construction, sometimes things have to go back precisely where they came from.
I took masking tape and labeled the back of each door and placed all hardware from the same cabinet into a bag and labeled each bag.
Protect your kitchen.
Cover anything you don’t want stained, dusty, or otherwise ruined. Even though we are planning to redo our counters very soon, I knew I would have to live with them for awhile longer and didn’t want to stare at dripped product all over them. I moved my oven to a new location and shifted my refrigerator so that it was still accessible.
After purchasing a plastic draping product that I placed across all my counters, I used it across several days of prepping, priming, and painting. I’ve also seen people use paper products and drop cloths to protect. Whatever you choose, go ahead and secure it with a few pieces of painter’s tape so that it remains stuck when the dust literally starts flying.
Speaking of painter’s tape, if you’ve got unsteady hands, go ahead and tape off the edges of your cabinets.
Degrease all cabinet surfaces.
With the doors and hardware removed, the next step was to degrease the cabinets. There are about a zillion ways to accomplish this task, so it’s really based on preference. Plenty of people recommend TSP, which is pretty toxic. Because I was painting alone in the house with my toddler (who isn’t old enough to call 911 if I were to have a reaction), I chose something gentler that ultimately was just as effective: Krud Kutter.
Krud Kutter was pretty darn amazing. But I’ll admit that it wasn’t even it’s cabinet cleaning that got my gears really going. It’s what it cleaned when I pulled my refrigerator out from the wall. It totally lived up to its name. Just for fun, I even used it in places in my crappily-sealed grout that had become stained over time. So powerful.
It worked just fine on my cabinets, too. I simply sprayed it on (full strength), let it sit for a minute, and wiped it off with a rag. I went through quite a few rags.
A word of caution: This product is meant to take off old sealer and latex paints as well. Be careful if you get it on painted kitchen walls as it will “stain.” I also encountered staining when I used it on my refrigerator. It’s a great product, but its powerful degreasing properties means it can strip surface finishes off surrounding items. Spray with caution.
Fill unwanted hardware holes.
When I first removed all the hardware from the cabinets, I wasn’t sure if I would reuse the hinges for the doors or not. I wanted to find something different but also knew with the age the doors and hinges that finding new hinges that fit might be a challenge. I went ahead and filled in the hardware holes on each cabinet with wood filler.
Plenty of people recommend Elmer’s brand wood filler, but I found DAP plastic wood was just as effective. Once on the cabinets, I let it dry 15 before attempting to sand it. I was very impressed with how well it sanded.
Thoroughly and carefully sand your surfaces.
Not to sound too scary, but sanding can be challenging, and it’s a real task to undo a rough sanding job. Luckily, I wasn’t going for perfection here. My goal was to simply scuff up the cabinets enough to give the primer and paint good adhesion. Because my cabinets are so old, there were places with gouges and dings that I wasn’t interested in completely sanding out. Sanding is all about how perfectly smooth you want your cabinets to look, and in an old house, perfection just doesn’t “fit” here. Cater your sanding needs accordingly.
Most of the sanding I had to do indoors because I didn’t remove the cabinet boxes from the walls. If you have some sort of respiratory issue, I highly recommend wearing some sort of mask if sanding needs to happen indoors. I won’t debate all the finer points of this, but lack of air circulation in a confined indoor space could cause some problems if you’re not careful.
I actually purchased a new sander for this step: a Ryobi Corner Cat. It performs like a champ. It’s very quiet (my toddler actually slept through all the indoor sanding), lightweight, and the cut of it allows for easy access to hard-to-reach spots. I wasn’t thoroughly impressed with its dust collector, but I would purchase it again in a heartbeat. Plus, it comes with a neat little carrying bag, which means it can be stored somewhere inside the house and not in the indistinguishable heaping pile o’ tools in the garage.
I used a 60-bit sandpaper to hit some of the more uneven areas of the cabinet (primarily areas with wood filler) and a 120-bit piece in areas that just needed a bit of scuffing.
Thoroughly Clean Cabinets (again).
That sanding job will kick up all kinds of dust, and you don’t want any of that trapped in the primer or paint. I hauled out my vacuum and thoroughly vacuumed inside and outside each inch of cabinet.
To follow up, I ran a tack cloth across all the surfaces afterward to pick up any surrounding dust kicked up by the vacuum’s fans.
Prime liberally.
You absolutely need to prime your cabinets, especially if they’re bare wood. Depending on the year of construct and the type of wood, you may be dealing with set-in stains or wood tannins that will bleed through your paint job.
When we painted our wood paneling a few years ago, we had places in the house where “pink” bled through. At the time, I was 8 months pregnant and not really in the mood to research what was going on, so I just lived with it (and continue to). However, these are tannins from the type of wood. Typically, a good coat of quality primer will seal up the wood and keep anything from bleeding through.
Another consideration is the type of primer. I chose an oil-based primer for the job because I knew I was going with a water-based paint. This made clean-up extra messy, so prepare well for this step (I did not).
In the end, I chose Zinsser Cover Stain primer. It worked well, but here’s where you can avoid my mistake: Be sure to use two coats if you’re dealing with bare wood. In places where I only used one coat, I eventually had to use many more coats of paint to get good coverage.
After the first coat of primer, I actually had quite a bit of tannin bleed-through in some areas. Interestingly, I also had a green food coloring bleed through. I had spilled green food coloring in the cabinets, and it bled through the first coat of primer. I went ahead and put two coats in problem areas and never had another issue. And it just so happened that these areas had better paint coverage down the road.
Final Thoughts
Overall, the prepping and priming of the cabinets took almost two days for me. It was by far the most time-heavy and labor-intensive part of the whole process. While I was on spring break from my teaching job, I happened to have whole days to devote to this. It probably would’ve taken significantly longer if I were doing this in whatever free time I could muster. Also, I was still primarily responsible for my toddler during this project, and if you have a toddler, you understand that toddlers respect the boundaries of no project. He definitely slowed me down.
I had never tackled a project of this magnitude by myself, so after prepping and priming, I was pretty proud. It gave me extra confidence to move into the painting phase knowing I had done the hardest part by myself.
I can’t wait to share the finished painted product with you!
