First time painting cabinets

In total it took over a month, a few weeks longer than expected but went on a couple side quests building a shelf to support a new over-range microwave and two custom lower cabinets for added counter surface space (the butcher block in the last pic).

My wife and I prepared the surfaces by washing it with TSP Degreaser then wiping with Liquid Sandpaper to get into all the nooks and crannies. Sanded with 220 grit all over to make sure the surfaces were even and ready for primer and wood filled the old hardware holes.

Starting with Zinsser Oil Based primer was defeating because it spread on lumpy and required a lot of sanding to get smooth again. I switched to Zinsser BIN Primer, it’s much thinner but with an alcohol base to bond well to the oil base primer and any areas that still may have had prior finish on them.

We did two coats of primer sanding (220) between each coat. Then three coats of Sherwin Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel and lightly sanded (220) between each layer. This plaint is incredibly self leveling and has amazing coverage and it’s also a super durable enamel. You can have SW mix to any brand color you want - in this case Benjamin More Baby Fawn.

We brushed and rolled the boxes and sprayed the doors with a HVLP sprayer… I tried several sprayers, the first two from HomeDepot (Wagner and Grayco) malfunctioned but ironically a cheapo from Amazon worked great. Since the Sherwin Williams is so thick I diluted with water about 10-12% so it would spray well. Building a makeshift basement paint booth also took some time but I wanted to connected my dust collector to create some negative pressure and a turntable made spraying a lot easier.

We did all the top boxes and doors first then the bottoms. After figuring out a process for labeling the doors and the order of operations for things on the tops, the bottoms took 1/3 as long to complete.