How to Paint Kitchen Cabinets Without Sanding or Priming (and get LONG-LASTING results)!

Time needed: 4 days

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Follow the steps below to paint your kitchen cabinets without sanding or priming.

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Remove your hardware, doors and drawers.
Remove all of your hardware. You will also need to remove your doors and drawers if you want to update your hinges (we spray painted our hinges). But you can leave everything inside of your cabinets since you don’t need to paint the insides of your cabinets. You only need to paint the doors (front and back) and the frame of the cabinets. You can leave your drawer boxes in place and just remove the drawer fronts, but I personally feel like it’s easier to keep the drawers in-tact.
Clean your cabinets
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Clean all of your cabinets, doors and drawers with a good cleaner like TSP. You want to be sure any grease and grime is off of them so that your paint adheres correctly.
Fill any holes.
Patch any holes that you will not be reusing with spackle or wood filler and sand appropriately. Be sure to remove any dust after sanding with a tack cloth.
Degloss all cabinet surfaces.
Lastly, wipe down your cabinet boxes, cabinet doors and drawers with a liquid deglosser or liquid sandpaper (this is the exact deglosser we used).This is a quick wipe-down. You do not need to scrub the old finish off and get down to bare wood. In fact, your cabinets may not look any different after you wipe them down—that is okay. I have included a video demonstration of deglossing as part of my Total Cabinet Transformation FREE training series-click here to subscribe and get access.
Paint your cabinets.
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If you are using General Finishes Milk Paint, you do not need to sand or prime! You are ready to start painting! We used the built-in benches on our deck to lay out our doors, which worked well. If you don’t have a large space to work with, just work in batches. I highly recommend using these painter’s pyramids that I discovered recently. I wish we had them when we painted these cabinets-they are awesome!We applied two coats of the General Finishes Milk Paint. We used a paintbrush for detail work and a dense foam roller for the flat areas. We used 3 quarts of the Seagull Gray and 2 pints of the Driftwood. We also used about 1/2 gallon of the topcoat. This paint gives excellent coverage and goes a long way. I did NOT sand between coats of paint because my finish was nice and smooth. But you could opt to lightly sand with 220-grit sandpaper before applying your second coat. Remember to wipe them down with a tack cloth after sanding if you do decide to sand.I am a pretty confident/experienced painter, so I didn’t use painter’s tape to tape off the walls around our cabinet boxes-I simply cut it with an angled brush. But if you are worried about getting paint on your walls, just use some painter’s tape along the edges of the cabinets.
Apply a protective top coat.
After your paint has dried for the correct amount of time (see details on the General Finishes can, but I can tell you this paint dries faster than any other paint I have ever used), you are ready to apply the General Finishes High-Performance Top Coat. We applied the recommended 3 (yes THREE) coats of the topcoat. Rest assured this step moves fairly quickly. But this topcoat is what gives the already durable paint an unbelievably durable finish.We chose a flat finish because our cabinets had so much wood grain. A flat finish reflects less light than a semi-gloss or gloss finish, so it makes the wood grain less visible. Please do keep in mind that paint alone is NOT going to eliminate wood grain. But you can make it less noticeable by choosing the flat finish topcoat.You want to apply thin coats. I used a brush and would recommend it over a roller. If the topcoat is applied too thickly or pools in any areas, those spots will dry with a yellow tinge. Three very thin, even coats is what you need!I have also heard from many people who have followed this tutorial to paint their cabinets with the Snow White color that the topcoat left a slight yellow cast on them. This is going to be true for pretty much ANY poly topcoat. This is something I talk about more in my Total Cabinet Transformation videos series which you can get FREE when you subscribe here. (Spoiler alert, I don’t recommend that anyone use Snow White straight out the can-I recommend mixing it with another color).
Optional: Paint your hinges.
If you don’t like the color of your hinges, you can spray paint them! It’s way more economical than buying new ones and you can avoid having to make new holes in your cabinets and/or doors if new hinges are a different size. Our old hinges and screws were brass-not a good look with gray cabinets. So, we spray painted our hinges AND the screws with Valspar Brushed Nickel Spray Paint and topped them with Valspar Satin Clear Coat.
Rehang doors, replace drawers & attach hardware.
Once your top coat is dry, you can rehang your doors, replace your drawers and reattach your old hardware or replace it with new hardware! We ditched our old hardware (not my style) and replaced it with new handles and drawer pulls. We have a lot of cabinets and doors, so we spent just over $300 on hardware, but I think it was well worth it.