Cabinet TOUCHUPS! The Art of Touch-Ups

This is Paint Life TV. I'm Chris, the Idaho Painter, and today I got a superstar guest with me today. It is I'm Captain Zach. And today we're going to be talking about doing touch-ups and the art of doing touch-ups. And doing touch-ups just takes a little bit of skill. It's a craft that with the proper tools and the proper training, you can do it and do it well. You can take a nick like this on this cabinet door and touch it up and you'll never see it. And some of this the principles we're using here that could be used on walls and doing other touch-ups throughout the house on your trim. And in order to do touch-ups and do them properly, you got to have the right tools, right, Zach? That's correct. And so you got a few tools right here. I think why don't you show us what you got? Yeah, so I got a an older sanding block just in case there's any rough spots on the edges or something like that. Uh I keep that with me while I'm doing touch-ups on cabinets. And then I also have one of these two-edge knives or a five in one or something like that just to clean up some nicks or any foreign objects that may have gone in the coating. So if you have something on the surface right here, you can just use that to scrape it off. That's great. And there's a multiple there's multiple different uses for that two-edge knife. But that's an amazing knife. Now, you also have a big old arsenal of touch-up brushes, don't you? Yeah. Bunch of different sizes and types. I use whatever I need to to get the job done. So why would you have so many different sizes of these touch-up brushes? because you really don't want to use something like this on a small nick like that if you're going to just swipe it and just leave it because it's going to leave a whole bunch of brush strokes and it's just not going to look very well. So, I'd use something like this, a nice little small one and I would just dab it on there and you'll never be able to see it. Okay. You also have like I see you got a spray can over here and that's in your toolbox of touch-up stuff, right? Yeah. So, this is made with the lacquer that we're using on these cabinets. It's uh tinted to match that. And we get it um the same time we get the lacquer, they just mix it up in a couple of cans for us. And that way we can spray the face of them if there's a big nick or something like that where uh a brush is just going to show up no matter what you do. The spray cans come in handy in case you have to come back to the customer's house and do a touchup and you need to maybe respray the face of a door. Instead of loading up a whole HVOP sprayer, you got a spray can of the exact color of the lacquer. And these spray cans work amazing. and you can spray a door and it's going to look just like it was sprayed with an HVLP sprayer. We also have these type of brushes. This is a white China bristle brush and we use white instead of black because these are more softer and more subable. Hopefully I said that word right, but they're softer. And when do we use something like this, Zach? Um, so we would use this if any of these edges were light or if there's holes cuz the system we use, we have to drill holes so that they hang on the clothes hanger. So, we'll fill those holes and then we'll use this to go and touch them all up. And in certain cases, if it's uh you know, some on the back side, and we can get away with doing that on uh a place where you wouldn't normally see it, uh we can go ahead and use this as well. If you had to do a big surface area like the back side of the door, I would never brush the front side of a door because it this will leave a pretty good finish, but it's not a sprayed on finish. It's going to leave a little bit of roping to it, but you can brush the backside of a door and get good, really good results. We do use rubber gloves, don't we? You got some gloves on. What are those things? Uh, these are some Raven gloves, and they're going to be on the store here pretty soon. So, yeah. So, any of the tools, or typically not all the tools, but some of the tools and accessories that we really like. We do sell them in our store on our website. Go to our website theidaho.com or our store, the actual link to that is store.theidaho.com, the idaho.com and you can find some of these really cool products that we like. We found these Raven gloves a while ago. We really like them. They're dustfree nitro gloves and they work really well and they're very resistant to chemicals and they're really tough, too. So, we use them on all kinds of stuff. So, if you have any tips or tricks, comments, also leave them in the comment section below. We would love to hear what you have to say. If you got some something to share about doing touch-ups that is different than what we do, just leave it below. We would love to hear it and our community would love to hear it. If you don't follow us on Facebook, check us out on Facebook. We've got a really cool group called Paint Life members. You can go get all kinds of questions answered there from all kinds of people in our group. And we also follow that group also. But we're going to deal with this this Nick right here now, Zach. So, what are some of the things you're going to do when dealing with this nick? You're going to select the right brush. So, select the right brush. And then you don't want to just brush it. Like I was saying earlier, you just want to do it. So, we're just going to take a little bit of lacquer on the end of this. So, you're kind of just using a dobbing method where you're just going to do it on that nick and not brush it on. Correct. How many coats is it going to take? Um, it's typically going to take about two to three coats. I would say with this one, it's probably going to be three. And then you want to be careful with the the following coats as well. You don't want to just brush those cuz it's just going to pull the lacquer back up. So, we're just going to take a little bit on the end of this brush here and then just dab it. So, you're just going to dab it on there. We're not going to worry about priming it. It's just a small nick. The previous coating underneath was lacquer and just going to dab it right on there. Now, the lacquer is really thin. We're not spraying it on. It's really thin. So, we're just going to dab it on. And like Zach said, we'll let that set for about five minutes and two or three coats. We do have another situation right here. We've got a door face. And this door face right here had some blemishes on it. And we're going to instead of, you know, dobbing or touching it up, we're going to have to sand it. And then we're going to have to reshoot it. So, I'm going to show you. Zach's got the spray can of lacquer. We've already sanded it and it's looking pretty good. Just a final sand. We're going to dust this thing off and then we'll set it on our spray twirly right here from Paint Line. And this thing is really cool because we can just spin this thing around and shoot all four sides of this thing and all four edges of it. But the spray can works really well for this. So you go ahead and spray that there, Z. And this is really just the perfect situation. We're going to have to touch this up anyway. And instead of going through the whole process of setting up an HVLP, we're just going to take this bomb can that we already have laying at the job site or in this case in the academy and we're going to go ahead and spray this really quick. So it's the exact same color. You're probably just going to hit it one coat. One nice thick coat. Yeah, one one coat on this. Don't have to worry about running because it's sitting here on this spray twite here. It's um sitting face down and it's not hanging. So, go ahead and spray that. There's that. You typically be wearing a respirator doing this, but for purposes of this video so we can talk and work at the same time, we're not using a respirator, but always wear a respirator. So, that's looking pretty good in that light right there. I'm liking that. So, we're going to let that set. If we needed to recoat it, we can recote it in about 5 minutes cuz it's a lacquer. So, there's a couple scenarios. We're going to, you know, a couple scenarios with um spraying. So, we just sprayed this one. I'm going to set it aside. So, we have this China bristle brush right here, Zach. And um we'll set this one here. We'll just do the back side. If you're going to um brush the this back of this, just show them what it looks like brushing this thing. So, this is a wider brush, so you can cover a larger surface area with that. You're not going to be using something this tiny to try to Right brush for the right job. The right brush for the right job. And this these artist brushes once again we have I mean just a whole bunch of different styles and sizes of these things. We do have a set that we do sell on our store that's a very versatile set that you can use to do these touch-ups. And these the we use these not only for doing lacquers but where we're doing trim trim trim touch-ups on on the insides of houses too. all the woodwork. So now Zach's getting he's getting a bunch of lacquer on there that he's going to lay that out. I'll hold this for you now. So that's what it looks like if you're brushing the lacquer on. This is the back side of a door right here. And you know, I I would be okay with the backside of the door being brushed in cir certain circumstances, but if you can spray it, it's going to be best to spray it. That is looking pretty good. That's going to gel out pretty nicely. We'll set that thing aside. Looking pretty good there, Zach. So, there's what it looks like. There's a few tips and tricks. One thing, choosing the right tools. Choose the right brush for the right touchup. And just do it on, right, Zach? Do it on. Don't brush it. just do it. If you got any tips and tricks, like we said, just leave them down in the questions or comments below. We would love to hear what you have to say on the art of doing touch-ups. Hopefully, you've enjoyed this video. If you have, we'll see you on our next video. Out out.