Lacqure Painted Kitchen Cabinets

I'm so excited to have my kitchen cabinets painted! It has been on my to do list for a long time. The finish was wearing off and they were looking pretty bad. I researched and read how the paint held up for other people. Most people said the acrylic paint was starting to chip a little after about a year. We needed something stronger with the use our kitchen gets.

 With the help of my brother who is an awesome cabinet maker we decided to paint with lacquer paint. My husband has experience using a paint gun(on cars) so we decided to do it ourselves. We learned a lot on the way and it was not easy, but definitely worth it in the long run. It took us two weeks to complete because we also glazed the cabinets.We are still waiting to install the counter-tops, back splash and range-hood, so here's a little before and after just of the cabinets.

Here's a close up from two years ago. They looked even worse now. You can see the post on our kitchen before here.

We removed the top cabinets and took them to my brother's shop.

All the doors were removed and painted in the garage.

 Everything was taped up and painted with a spray gun.

And here's what it looked like on the other side for two long weeks.

We made other changes to the cabinets while we were at it. With help from my brother at Inteligent Design Woodwork we raised the cabinets to the sealing and added a shelf to the lower part. We also removed the breadbox in the corner. He did a great job and you can't even tell the shelves were added on. If you get a chance check out his website, he does some really unique things and everything he builds is made well to last a looong time. He said we now have custom cabinets and I'm so glad he could do them for us. 

Glazing was kind of tricky with lacquer paint. With acrylic paint if it doesn't look right you have a lot of flexibility and it's pretty easy to fix mess ups, lacquer is different.  On our first try the places where the paint was ruff from over spray soaked in more glaze than the rest. We tried sanding it but that left scratch marks and more dark spots. We repainted everything and were planing on leaving them white. We took all the tape and paper off and then stated researching how to glaze (smart:) We found that if you rub lacquer paint with a brown paper bag you can smooth it out. We tried it and it worked pretty well. Now we kept going back and forth for a couple days; should we do it, what if it was a disaster again?

  After about three days of debating I finally decided I would try again. I'm glad I did it when everyone was out of the house because things didn't go smoothly the whole time and I could work better without the pressure of everyone watching while I fixed it up. I'm so glad we did it because it adds so much more character. I liked it white but I love it glazed! Our top reason we glazed was to hide some of the some of the mess and with a house full of kids I know we made the right choice! I can't wait to get the rest of the kitchen finished and show you all of it!