11/25/2024
Cabinet refinishing serivecs outline.
Love your old cabinets again. I'll come and number all the doors so it's easy to identify where they came from. Then I remove all of your cabinetry doors and take them to my pressurized paint booth, so the work is done off site away from your home. First of all if the wood has been painted before there's a good chance I'm going to just recommend stripping them so that i have a clean slate to work from. I cant create a beatiful smooth texture if the old texture from before still exists right. Also, before i discuss the process in detail, all spraying is done using gravity fed hvlp guns. There's a lot of ads with videos of companies who use airless sprayer to paint cabinets. This is a mistake, my airless sprayer shoots .75 gallons a min. Does that sound like a machine that's meant to paint cabinet doors? The airless doesn't even have any kind of adjustment you can make on your gun, your supposed to just eye ball the pressure k**b on the sprayer that turns one full turn that ranges the pressure between 1000 and 3000 psi. Thats the only control you have on an airless. Airless sprayers are for covering a lot of square footage very qu**ky. Like priming fresh drywall in a house and painting ceilings. They can be used to paint trim but just like baseboards and crown moulding ( not stuff at eye level). I used the same guns to spray cabinets as ones I do to spray cars ok. You want more, but thinner coats, reading the manufacturers tds to follow the recoat Windows. A lot of painters complain about Benjamin Moores advance paint line which is for cabinets. They say it dries gummy or soft. That's because there's a 8 hour wait time between when your supposed to recoat, and if you recoat before that your not allowing the previous coat to fully dry. No wonder they have gummy cabinets. Most painters using interior home paints, and other waterborner coatings treat it like seen 1 seen em all. When I began painting automotive projects its a whole other ball game using not only very sophisticated coatings but very expensive ones that you don't wanna waste a drop and to ensure things go well you learn to rely on the information provided in the tds and sds. So now I do that with any new paint.
I use a 3m accuspray gun that's very sophisticated and unique to most hvlp guns. The tips are quickly interchangeable and deposable so any time you throw a new tip on the gun, the gun is basically brand new again. They range in or***ce size of 1.2 through to 2.0. Priming is done with a 2.0 because you want to lay the highbuild primer on a little thicker because you sand most of it off leaving a perfectly flat surface. Some times clients prefer the gain of the wood to remain, in that case we prime with only the epoxy primer that isn't meant to be sanded and just degrease the surfaces and tac before applying the colour paint. I like to use waterborne colour paint from brands like Renner, Benjamin Moores advance, Sherwin Williams Emerald. I also have a wide range of solvent based coatings that offer higher degrees of durability but I find they are unnecessary, especially because I always recommend that the colour paint be top coated with a 2k urethane clear coat. I think it's pretty half assed not to top coat cabinet doors when you consider the amount of touching they recieve, and it's the only way to effective create a product that I can provide a warrenty for. Top coats are available in any finish from matte to full gloss. I have method to remove any orange peel left on the surface after spraying. I also use a bake cycle to heat up the room where the doors are drying up to 60c for 1 hours to ensure full curing happens within a timely manner before transporting the doors. The completed doors are individually wrapped in cloth to divide them and to prevent any damage during the delivery.
As far as the cabinet carcasses, usually I use frog tape to prevent any brush mishaps and ensure perfectly straight lines when only painting the carcasses outer face that the doors attach to. Any large surface of the carcass that requires painting to avoid spraying in people kitchens ( although this service is definitely available in a spray method) I use low profile velour wiz roller sleeves that have very small fibers that allow me to easily mimic the texture of a sprayed surface. Most people can't tell the difference actually. And these surfaces recieve the same process as the doors with all the same coatings.
I charge 40 dollars a door, and the work comes with a 10 year warrenty because you d have to take Sharp metal objects with a lot of elbow grease to damage any surface with these urethanes.
