Why Paint Rather Than Replace?

A full kitchen replacement is a big, disruptive job, and it is rarely necessary if your carcasses are sound. Solid doors, decent drawer boxes and hinges that still hold true are worth keeping. Paint them well and you can change the whole mood of the room for a fraction of the cost — a soft sage green in a cottage, or a deep charcoal in a modern flat.

What puts most people off is the fear of a lumpy, brush-marked finish. That fear is reasonable. Most disappointing cabinet paint jobs fail for one of three reasons: grease left on the surface, a rushed primer, or thick coats applied to save time. Get those three things right and a smooth, hard-wearing finish is perfectly achievable in a normal British kitchen over two or three weekends.

Clear the Room and Label Everything

Before you open a tin of paint, spend an afternoon taking the kitchen apart properly. This stage saves hours later.

• Photograph every run of units before you touch anything, including close-ups of hinge positions.
• Remove doors and drawers and lay them flat on trestles or battens in a garage, spare room or conservatory. Working flat prevents runs.
• Take off handles, knobs and hinges. Drop the screws for each door into its own small bag and label it.
• Number each door with masking tape and put a matching strip of tape inside the carcass where it belongs. A run of near-identical doors is impossible to sort out from memory.
• If you are reusing the hinges, keep each set with its own door. Hinges bed in to their screw holes over time and swapping them about can cause alignment headaches.

New handles are a cheap upgrade at this point, so measure the hole centres before you shop.

Clean Until the Cloth Comes Away Clean

Kitchen grease is invisible until it ruins your paint. It also drifts, so it settles on cabinet fronts even if you never fry anything.

Use a strong sugar soap solution and a microfibre cloth, and work in sections. Give extra attention to the area around handles, the space beside the hob and the tops of doors where steam and cooking vapours collect. Rinse with clean warm water and let everything dry thoroughly. If the surface still feels slightly tacky or your cloth comes away discoloured, clean it again. A final wipe with a cloth dampened with white spirit helps on older, heavily used cabinets, but always let it flash off completely before painting.

Sand, Fill and Make Good

You are not trying to strip the old finish, just to give the new paint something to grip. Sand by hand with 120 to 150 grit, then finish with 180 grit. Use a sanding block on flat panels and a folded piece of paper for moulded edges, and be gentle around corners where the veneer is thin.

Fill any dents, chipped edges and old screw holes with a two-part wood filler, then sand flush once cured. Wipe every surface down with a tack cloth to lift the dust. If your doors are high-gloss laminate, melamine or a factory finish, they will need a dedicated bonding primer; ordinary primer will simply scratch off later.

Prime With Purpose

Primer is not optional, and it is not the same as paint. It seals, it bonds and it gives you an even base so your topcoat goes on with consistent colour.

For bare timber and MDF edges, a good water-based wood primer is ideal. For knots, stained patches or old dark colours bleeding through, use a shellac-based primer, which blocks stains and dries in under an hour. Apply with a small foam roller and a brush for the profiles, keeping the coats thin. Two light coats beat one heavy one every time.

Thin Coats and Careful Reassembly

Choose a water-based satin or eggshell designed for trim and cabinets. These dry hard, resist knocks and clean up with warm soapy water. Avoid standard wall emulsion; it marks and scuffs far too easily in a working kitchen.

Apply two or three thin coats. Use a mini foam roller on flat panels and a good synthetic brush on mouldings and edges. Roll in one direction, lay off lightly with the brush where roller and brush meet, and resist the urge to keep going back over wet paint. Sand very lightly with 320 grit between coats once dry, then wipe with a tack cloth.

Let each coat dry fully — usually four to six hours in a warm, well-ventilated room — and keep the space as dust-free as you can. Allow the final coat to cure for at least three days before refitting, and a full week before scrubbing anything. Rehang the doors in their numbered positions, refit the hinges and hardware, and adjust the hinge screws until the gaps are even. Small tweaks make a big difference to how professional the finished kitchen looks.