How to Paint Kitchen Cabinets

I dream of a brand new kitchen: spacious and gorgeous and perfectly planned for my ideal layout! You know, a space where I can whip up my favorite recipes: rhubarb muffins, some sabayon, and lemon meringue cupcakes (yum, those were good)! Reality is not always my dream, but a refresh is always a quick and simple way to give a new look. Honestly, I have never touched my kitchen, mostly because I felt painting cabinets at home was subpar. I hated the idea of the paint chipping, not wearing well, and honestly, just looking home-finished as opposed to professional. But that’s all changing because I’m going to show you how to paint kitchen cabinets.

After hours of online research, I stumbled across a paint from General Finishes that actually looks good and incorporates a top coat that provides a beautiful finish. It’s a pretty simple process:

Watch how to paint kitchen cabinets

Step-by-step process to paint kitchen cabinets

1. To start, de-gloss the doors to rough up the finish and clean off any grease and grime. OPTIONAL: At this point, you can also sand down the doors to ensure that the paint will have no leak-through of the underlying stain.
2. Next, apply a stain-blocking primer to ensure none of the dark, stained color bleeds through.
3. Next, apply two coats of the General Finishes Milk Paint. I went with “Snow White” because I wanted clean and simple, but there are many colors to choose from. The painting was a bit tedious, but it’s a very thick paint that creates a beautiful cover.
4. To finish, apply three coats of the General Finishes High Performance top coat. This gives an extraordinary finish, honestly close to a factory finish. Three coats sounds like a lot but these coats go extremely fast and are definitely worth it. (See update below!)

Painting cabinets is a large undertaking, but with General Finishes, the outcome is definitely worth the work. Some simple tricks and tips will hopefully leave you inspired to refresh your own projects!