Just over a year ago I painted my kitchen cabinets.
Our kitchen was absolutely awful! The old cherry cabinets had never been cleaned and the kitchen grease had worked its way under the finish. Close the cabinets too hard and grease and finish would flake off onto the chipped tile counters.
It needed a full remodel that we could not afford. A little paint and new countertops I found on clearance through LetGo gave us a kitchen we could use and be proud of.
Painted cabinets are more fragile than professionally finished cabinets, and after a full year of toddler wear and tear, I can finally report on how well the paint held up.
What we did
Painting cabinets is not as simple as throwing on the final color and being done. There is a lot more work that goes into painting cabinets so they look and feel professional.
We started by stripping all the doors and sanding the boxes. Normally, you would be able to just sand the doors and boxes so the paint would adhere, but our doors had 10+ years of grease burrowed into them. The only way to get them to a point they could be painted was to fully strip off all the grease and varnish.
Then we sanded the doors and cleaned them so they were pristine.
From there it was two coats of primer and two coats of the cabinet paint. Then we finished it off with 3- 5 coats of varnish in the hopes it would be bulletproof.
One year later…
The upper cabinets held up really well. There is minimal wear and tear on them and they look just as pristine as the day we painted them. We wipe them down once a month or so with Lysol and a vinegar-based cleaner.
The lower cabinets are a different story. Many of the baby-proofing strategies on our most used cabinets chipped the paint. Lesser used cabinets are still gorgeous.
So we have some touchups that need to happen around the handles, but it held up pretty well overall.
What we would do differently
At the end of the day, it was the baby-proofing that hurt the cabinets, not normal general use.
Anything that required interacting at the front of the cabinet caused much more wear and tear. If I had to do it all again I would use these manual child safety cabinet latches for baby proofing instead. Sometimes old school is better.
Have you painted your cabinets? How did they hold up? Let me know!