Painting the Kitchen Cabinets & Swapping Pull Hardware

One lesson learned in the cabinet/counter/backsplash renovation was that timing is everything. We tried to run both projects in parallel, which proved to be fairly difficult. This is because the cabinet painting itself was a 7 step process, and took the better part of a week and a half. Whereas, once the granite/travertine was removed from counter/backsplash, the installation of the new marble/subway tile could actually be done in about a day and a half. But we wanted to get the cabinet frames painted prior to installation of the other kitchen elements, so we inadvertently tripped over our own schedule feet a couple times. Oh well!

Regardless, the kitchen cabinet painting SEEMED like it may be easy enough (and much cheaper) for us to do it ourselves. We are so glad that we didn’t. Much like the other painting (which we found out we weren’t great at), it would have been super tedious and required many long nights. To give you an appreciation of the process that was followed, it was seven steps in all. This included removal of the doors, sanding, priming, re-sanding, priming, painting (multiple coats). See below for a couple of the “in-flight” pictures.

Once the cabinet doors were ready to re-install, we had to go ahead and switch out the knobs for stainless pulls (pictures below). The only complicated part about this was that our cabinet painter said he had never installed new pulls before. Much to my surprise, I said “ok” and decided to figure it out on my own. After sourcing the pulls from Amazon (MUCH cheaper than buying them all at Lowe’s since there were over 30 pulls in the whole kitchen), all I needed to do was drill a secondary hole to secure the pulls. The reason this was required was that the knob only had 1 screw/hole, whereas the stainless pulls needed to be anchored with two screws/holes. There is a template that you can buy in the cabinet hardware section at Lowe’s that has many of the common offsets already there. I highly recommend using one of those and a mechanical pencil to lay out your hole drilling plans.

Here are some of the pictures (without spoiling the surprise of the finished counter/backsplash):

Doors Off; Painting Frames In-Flight
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Doors Painted and Air Drying in Basement
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Drawers with Pulls Installed

Til Next Time,

Michael