Painting Kitchen Cabinets: A Crime Of Opportunity
Want custom kitchen cabinets but don’t have the budget? I’m here to share the real, unfiltered truth about painting kitchen cabinets. Whether or not you choose to partake is your own business. Oh. In case you forgot, I’m nowhere near a professional.
You’ve heard people say the kitchen is the heart of a home, right? Well, if that’s true, then we’re close to flatlining over here, shawty. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration but our kitchen is definitely nothing to write home about at the moment.




Forgive the photo quality here. This is a combination of realtor photos and some that I snapped super quick with my phone before this baby little tiny infant blog was born so quantity was better than quality at this point, ya feel me?
Why choose painting your kitchen cabinets?
It’s cheap. Duh.
The 5 year plan is to completely gut the kitchen, blow out the wall that currently houses our desk-turned-shelf cabinets and our fridge, and completely do a new open concept kitchen. BUT, we also do not have a billion dollars laying around unless one of you fine folks feels led to donate to our kitchen fund. So, painting it is! The cost to paint cabinets is extremely low, especially cared to a full gut job.
Let me be clear: This was what I call a crime of opportunity. I was not ready to do this project but Jordan was out of town and I was supposed to be out of town but ended up not having to go, so I figured if I had to cuss or cry or freak out, I could do it in the comfort of my own home in my paint covered clothes without judgey eyes of my pastor husband. Plus, I literally had all the stuff I needed at home so I had no excuses.


The only thing I needed was Kilz and our Home Depot is directly across from the gym I go to so…..UGH. I guess I’m painting kitchen cabinets. I did, however, want to talk about the truth behind what you may read on the internet about kitchen cabinets.
Before I decided to embark on this, I read a lot. My goal was to find a way to do this without sanding and/or priming and lo and behold THERE IS NO WAY GUYS. I’m telling you, no matter what you read about how to paint cabinets without sanding don’t believe it unless you use milk paint, BUT a quick search on Amazon shows that stuff 1) ain’t cheap and 2) I wasn’t going to spend money when I already had all the things I needed.


I first had to take all the kitchen cabinet doors off the hinges, number them so I knew where they would go back, and get to washing these filthy hinges and screws since I was going to be spray painting and reusing them.

I let them soak and then took them out and brushed them with a wire brush and let them dry. Some were rusted or the color was coming off but that didn’t matter too much to me since I was going to be spray painting them.



First up was sanding and filling existing knob holes (which sounds really vulgar but it’s not) with wood putty and sanding some more. Pro tip from a non-pro: Don’t skip this. If you’re not one of those people who cleans cabinets weekly (which who are you if you do, you freak?) then sand.


Next was primer. Everything I read said don’t freak out when you apply your first coat of primer. Let me just tell you I FREAKED OUT. Wouldn’t you if you saw this?!

SHEER. PANIC. I’ve never had to use primer on anything and I was fully convinced this is how the paint would look once it was on there. Alas, I kept going. When the base cabinet looked like this after one coat, I calmed.

Here is the (semi) finished product:


Oh I know what you’re going to say. It was so brutal that there has been a longggggg pauuuuuuse in between painting the uppers, but they’re coming. I’ll keep you posted and post sources once they’re all done and ready to be photographed.
Click here to continue to part 2 of this transformation!

