Cabinet Painting in Citrus Heights, CA

Cabinets are the one interior surface where spraying genuinely beats brushing, because a kitchen door is looked at from two feet away in raking light and any brush mark shows. Doors and drawer fronts come off, get labeled so they go back where they came from, and get sprayed flat rather than hung — which is why the photograph on this page is a bench full of doors and not a finished kitchen.

The preparation is what separates a cabinet job that lasts from one that chips within a year. Kitchen cabinets carry cooking grease whether or not they look like it, and nothing bonds to grease. They get cleaned with a degreaser, then deglossed or scuff-sanded so the primer has a mechanical key, then primed with something made to stick to a factory finish. Skipping any of those three is how you get a door that looks perfect and peels at the handle six months later.

The frames and boxes stay in place and get done by hand, because they cannot come off. Hardware comes off and goes back on at the end — hinges, handles, knobs — and this is a good moment to change hardware if you were thinking about it, since everything is already off.

Expect a kitchen to be out of normal use for several days. The doors are away being sprayed and cured, and a finish that is dry to the touch is not yet hard enough to take a slammed door or a stacked plate. Rushing the cure is the other common way a good cabinet job goes wrong.

A typical project here runs 26 to 30 cabinets, and it does not have to be a kitchen. Bathroom vanities, bedroom and hallway built-ins and laundry cabinetry are the same work, and are often done in the same visit — the sprayer is already set up and the doors are already coming off. A project that size is a matter of days rather than weeks, which is worth knowing before you plan around it.