How to get well painted kitchen cabinets -- first time
If your home is like mine, the kitchen is a very well-used room. And the doors on the cupboards and cabinets get a lot of use. (If you have teenage boys, some of those cabinet doors get opened and shut hard!)
Any surfaces and cabinets near the oven will be subjected to some extremes of temperature! And then it is common -- almost an every-day occurrence in most home, actually -- to find the kitchen is filled up with steam when pots are being attended to or opened up to serve the meal. On a rainy winter night in our city, the kitchen is filled with steam and humidity and heat.
The demands of the harsh, quickly-changing kitchen environment puts unusually high amounts of stress on your cabinets and the paint they are coated with. As well as this, of course, think of all the grease and organic matter you inadvertently smear over your cabinets when you open doors and brush against them as you cook.
There are harsh solvents and chemicals in small quantities in these things, and over time they leave their mark. Literally. So your kitchen cabinet paint work has to be of a high standard.
I know this from my own kitchen. My wife and I used cheaper paint to do wall paper on the walls of our kitchen earlier in the year, when we had finished remodeling and putting in new cabinets. The paint work looked good for quite a while, but I notice now that the paint job is half a year or more old, the seams in the wall paper are creeping apart in some places. And the edges are curling up in strange places. Obviously we should have used a better quality paint.
There are several ways to paint kitchen cabinets. Many people like to varnish or lacquer them, and this can work well. Others will use conventional paint, and they have to decide on a color scheme, the number of different colors they will put in the mix, and the quality of the paint. When my wife and I painted our kitchen we opted to give it a totally new look by replacing a cream bench top with a granite-colored one.
Working from this color we selected the colors for the cabinets and doors, and went ahead. We are pleased with the result.