Before You Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets

This post is in Collaboration with Home Depot – We were sponsored to do this project – However all opinions are my own.

My husband and I met in 2011. We were both 23 years old and we lived in Minneapolis, MN. The year we met we did not know we would end up spending the rest of our lives together. We did not know we would have 2 girls, and we did not know we would settle into our forever home in Las Vegas, NV. We have moved a total of 4 times….or is it 5?…before we found this home and the one thing I have always wanted in my forever home was a white kitchen. In all those homes we lived in, not one kitchen was white, and that includes the kitchen in our now home.

You know your getting old when making your kitchen into the beautiful, dream kitchen you have always wanted is something that brings actual tears to your eyes! Or maybe I am just extra emotional…errr passionate 😉

Since I decided to be a blogger back in 2017, I have had the opportunities to work with brands that are important to me. I will be honest…Home Depot® was always my least favorite store growing up… I remember going there with my dad and feeling like time was crawling by. Who in their right mind could actually stand in front of an isle of screws and nails for hours on end trying to find just the right one… I mean come onnnn… its nails!!! They all work the same? Right?

And yet now here I am, a full grown woman of 2 little girls, and Home Depot® is by far one of my ton favorite stores that I frequent on a regular basis. And yes I will spend way too much time in one isle deciding on the right product! My poor girls… I have always loved to craft, ask anyone in my family. Being creative made me happy. It wasn’t until I got to know my mom friends though, that I retained the confidence to actually start making our home ours, and getting my hands dirty. I started to build things, make holes in the wall, make mistakes…and more mistakes…, but eventually get it right and be able to stand back and feel that emotion of absolute pride. I love making our home ours, I love putting my print on every corner, and as far as I can see, I am not slowing down anytime soon.

Working with Home Depot® has been a fun and challenging project that made a lasting memory for my husband and I. We originally had a plan to make a secret passage way in the girls’ playroom, but since we ran out of space in there, we settled on painting our kitchen cabinets white, and doing it all under $300! My dream come true, and my husbands dream in cost come true, haha!

I am going to share the steps we took, the products we used (all from Home Depot), and the mishaps we had so you can avoid them yourself if you have been thinking about doing a project like this yourself! At the end, if there is anything I left out that you wish I would have shared about, please feel free to leave a question below!

Step 1: Shop Products

My hubby is a researcher and of course before we did anything at all, he looked up ways that others had painted their kitchen cabinets to get an idea of what we would all need. After that we headed over to Home Depot to load up on supplies.

Here is what we got:

6 Plastic Mini Roller Trays – $7.48

2 4packs of white 4″ foam rollers – $9.94

2 Better 2.0 Angle Oil Paint Brushes – $16.94

2 HD White Foam 4″ 5packs – $17.94

1 Roll Red Rosin Paper – $13.97

2 Behr ALK 3900 White Paint – $71.96

2Gallon BE 123 WB Primer/Sealer – $35.98

1.5″ ScotchBlue Paint Tape (6pk) – $31.98

2 in 1 Towels (12pk) – $7.98

KS Easy Liquid Sander Deglosser – $8.97

2 Mini White Foam Roller With Frame – $9.94

TOTAL – $249.97 (with tax)

2. Set Up

We already owned a paint sprayer and plastic tarp. After we took all the cabinet doors and drawer faces off, we emptied all the cabinets, peeled this horrible sticker liner out of every drawer and shelf, and got to work setting up the supplies so we could get started. Arthur set up a space in our garage to paint in, and to be honest I was quite impressed. He was pretty proud of it, and we actually highly recommend doing this to avoid getting paint everywhere. Even though it kind of did anyway 😛

3. Before we could do anything we needed to go through the entire kitchen and all the doors and faces, and just scrub them down with soap and water. We wanted to clean up any food that had been stuck to any surfaces that we may have missed, grease, and dust, and just get as clean and as smooth of a surface as we could.

4. Next we went through to create an even better based, and instead of actually sanding everything down, we used liquid sander and rubbed everything down with that.

5. After all of that, we were finally able to start priming. We used a “no sanding needed” primer (who knew that existed?), and with a 2 hour dry time this took us through an entire afternoon.

6. Finally we were able to put on our first layer of paint. The paint had a dry time of 4-8 hours. Since we had to flip every door and drawer face, it took two days to do both layers. However we made one major mistake that pushed us into another day! It was hard to keep the primer and paint separate since we poured both of them into separate jugs for the paint sprayer. Unfortunately we missed them up, and instead of putting on a second layer of paint…we did another layer of primer on top of the first layer of paint! oops!

7. On the 5th day we were finally able to put the doors and drawer faces back on, and let me tell you, it was the best feeling ever! We were beyond exhausted and beyond thrilled with the result!

I will be doing a full reveal post this Friday with photos of the before and after, so stay tuned for that!