Mission: Kitchen cabinets. Objective: Blue.

I think for about two weeks straight while working on this project, I would show up to work every morning with blue paint on my hands.  And in my belly button.  And in my hair.

Seriously.  Painting kitchen cabinets is no joke.  Though it is not technically difficult, the necessary time investment is ridiculous.  I am SO glad I decided to get this done before we moved in to the new house (I finished the painting part well before we moved in, but was not able to actually re-hang everything in the kitchen until this past weekend).

Technically, there was nothing wrong with our kitchen cabinets.  They're in good shape, and they're not very old at all... they were just... meh.

So, I decided to paint the cabinets.  After looking through millions of photos online of various kitchen color schemes, and once we had decided on definitely using Mexican tiles in the kitchen, the decision was made to paint our cabinets blue.  I tried a couple of different shades of blue, and ended up choosing the one that most closely matches the blue that shows up in most Talavera-style tiles and decor.  That way, no matter what tile colors we end up using for the floor accents of the wall backsplash, it'll all be somewhat coordinated.

Keep in mind that we are doing most of the work on our new house in the evenings after we get off of work, so things are taking longer to get done than they would otherwise.  This whole process took a little more than a week and a half from start to finish, during which time I worked on nothing but this task.  The first night, I took off all of the cabinet doors and drawer fronts, removed all the horrible hardware, and gave all of the cabinets a light sanding.  This seemed to take forever.

It took me a good portion of one night to prime the cabinets in the kitchen, and another night (with assistance from my coworker Lisa) to prime all of the doors.  We have 30+ doors and drawer fronts in our kitchen.  That is fantastic for storage, not so fantastic for painting.  I used KILLZ primer, and it seemed to work pretty well, although I wish it had been a little bit thicker because then maybe my single coat of primer would have looked a bit nicer (yes, maybe I should have just done two coats of primer.. but seriously, this was taking way too long; I'm impatient).  [Josh told me that I "did a crap job" priming everything.  I'm keeping that one in my back pocket for later, folks.]

I went to work on painting the cabinets before I bothered with the doors.  This turned out to be a good plan, because the cabinets themselves required three coats of paint whereas the doors only needed two (the cabinets themselves are a glorified laminate material, but the doors are actually real wood- this made a big difference).  I left the inside of the cabinets alone because I figured it might look a little too dark if everything was the same blue color.  I think it was the right choice.

I used Valspar Signature Paint+Primer, and have no complaints.  I had a little bit of an issue with roller marks staying on the side of the cabinets, but I think that was more a result of using a less-than-awesome roller than the paint itself.  And I love the color!  It's call Deep Sea Diving.

It took me a few days to paint the cabinets and the doors, but with each new coat of paint they just looked better and better.  Once everything was totally dry and done, I gave two good coats of polyurethane to the doors and the ends of the cabinets to keep them protected.  Considering the messes that result when my betrothed cooks, these cabinets are going to be subject to quite a bit of scrubbing in the future, and I'll be damned if I want to go through this whole painting process again any time soon!  The polyurethane took a few days to completely seal, and I did two coats just to be sure.

I finally got to hang everything back in the kitchen this past weekend, and I couldn't be more pleased with how it all turned out.  The color of the cabinets looks fantastic with our newly tiled floors (more on this in a different post).  After moving everything inside from the workshop I noticed a few dinged or rough spots that I'll have to patch up with a little bit more paint, but you can't even see the imperfections unless you are right up next to them so I'm not going to stress about it for now.  I purchased some new cabinet hardware to match our faucet and light switch covers, and that just about sums it up!  Not bad, eh?

Before...

During...

After!

Summary:  Painting cabinets is kind of a bitch.  It's not hard to do, it just takes forever.  But for me, it was completely, totally worth it.  Almost makes me want to go paint the cabinets in our bathroom too...