How to Paint Cabinets Step by Step! Everything You Need to Know to Start Your Cabinet Renovation Now

this paint life tv i am chris the idaho painter and today's video is all about cabinet painting this video is going to be all about the estimating process the prepping process the painting process and everything in between if you want any information how to paint your kitchen cabinets or any type of cabinetry this is the video for you it is a long video but we're going to teach you everything you need to know about getting a professional finish on cabinets so stay tuned for this video it is quite a long video so grab yourself i don't know something to eat or drink get on the couch get in your bed and start watching this so you can produce a professional finish on your cabinets if you haven't subscribed to our channel on paintlifetv hit the subscribe button hit the notification bell right next to it they go kind of hand in hand don't know why youtube has separated the two but if you don't hit one or the other they don't really mean anything and all it does is allows youtube to email you every time i come out with a new video it's free and easy to do now it's gonna be free and easy to do for the next 10 years it's never going to cost you anything we're never going to market to you it's a simple way to help support us and our channel and help us keep making these videos so enough chat enough um i don't know nonsense let's get on to how to get a professional penis finish or finish on cabinets [Music] all right now let's talk about how i estimate cabinets in the estimating process i've taught on how to estimate um do exterior estimates online using google earth taught about how to do interior estimates and estimating fences and stuff like that and estimated cabinets i'm working on a cabinet job right here and this is a vanity makeover video if you want to see this video coming up how i turn a 25 cabinet into a 500 cabinet stay tuned for that video but how do you go about estimating a job like this or how do you go about estimating a full kitchen if you don't have any experience and i estimated cabinets one way for quite a bit of my career and i came up with a different method that was very simple and easy to do and and when i do estimating i like my estimate estimating process really to be very simple i like to be able to do it over the phone if i have to not even show up at the job site so how do you do that you've got to have like systems processes numbers that all make sense where you can just ask a customer a bunch of questions come up with a number and give them an estimate and like my exterior bids a lot of times they don't even drive out to the house i just look at it on google earth and i want my system or estimated process to be very simple and easy and how i come up with an estimate for a cabinet job is i start off with a um door or drawer price and there's a fixed price that i just count the doors or drawers and then that will give me a number and that's a base price now when i do estimating whether it's an exterior whether it's an interior i do have these fixed prices like on an exterior i have a fixed price of a dollar 65 square foot and that is my base price and everything is built off of that using numbers and also the human element there are times you're going to have to go out to a job there's times when i have to go out to a cabinet job and look at the job and use human judgment and see if my numbers are coming out right or is the job going to be a lot more difficult or a lot easier where i can make some adjustments to those numbers but i have a cabinet right here and i'll walk you in and show you a full kitchen set of cabinets and how i went about estimating the full set of kitchen cabinets but it's it's a door and drawer price so there's a there's drawers right here you got one two three three drawers you got a drawer right here a fourth drawer and then you've got a door and my base price per drawer is 95 per drawer and then it's a hundred and fifteen dollars for door so here's a door and here's a drawer front right here so 95 dollars per drawer 115 dollars per door and that's the base price that everything is built off from there but now there's going to be some things you're going to run into with cabinet paint jobs you have oak grain that's going to make the job a lot more difficult than a set of kitchen cabinets that's already painted and you're just repainting it versus starting with a really grainy bare uh grainy wood like oak and so i'm going to talk about some of the additional charges that are built into that base price are not built into it's added onto that base price of 115.95 all right so i'm going to talk about one of the things you're going to run into in the cabinet repaints that is a whole lot more work that you're definitely going to want to add on an additional charge to your cabinet drawer or door price so right here this is one and it's oak wood grain and anytime you have a real grainy wood it's going to take a lot of work to get rid of that grain now let me talk about customer expectations a little bit because when you're doing a cabinet painting job this is where whether you're talking to the customer on the phone or whether you're talking to them in person a lot of times cabinet jobs are a lot better dealt with and estimating done in person where you can look at the cabinets and talk about your process how you go about painting but what is the customer's expectations are the customers expectations that this looked like a flat finish and not a wood grain and in the end result really because this thing right here was designed to be stained and lacquered and not to have a flat finish and look like a birch cabinet door but if a customer wanted this thing to look like a birch cabinet door not have any wood grain to it it's going to take a lot of work to eliminate the wood grain just like this we're using aquacoat on this cabinet door because we're trying to eliminate probably 90 percent of the wood grain effect to it and the um like the pinholes and dark shadows created when you paint something like this white using aquaco we got three coats of aquacoat sanding in between aquaco that takes a lot of time and effort to deal with that if you try to paint oak white without feeling any grain at all uh probably 90 of your customers are not going to like the outcome of the cabinet but you do have to discuss um in the very beginning your expectations and then your budget i mean what happens is the additional charges just make the price go up higher maybe the customer doesn't have a budget that is as high to fill wood grain but um they really want their cabinets painted and they're not as picky as eliminating all the wood grain so i have a price per door or drawer and it's 20 per door or drawer and the face frames are always included and i'll get to that down the road when i'm talking door and drawer price the face frame is included in that price so you've got to eliminate wood grain here and you've got to eliminate wood grain there it's 20 per door or drawer and that includes the wood face frames so i do have side panels on here and this is just a laminate side panel that has just an imitation wood effect on it i don't have to eliminate any grain on there we'll talk about side panels a little bit um because that's an additional charge too in a kitchen when i walk you into and show you this kitchen there's a large upside panel and where a refrigerator is and what i actually do is i break that side panel up into uh door fronts and so i look at a side panel and an average size door front i'm going to say it's about this big i'm going to say how many door would fit in that panel and i'm going to call that like the one panel we'll see it's about four door panels we'll cover that whole um side refrigerator panel so i'm going to call it four door fronts and that's how i deal with really large panels and um the face frames are always included large panels are broken down into door fronts and we'll give you an example when we walk walk into this kitchen the next item that i have as an additional charge to my door and drawer front is we see quite often is naughty alder cabinets and naughty alder's going to be an alder that has a lot of open knots in it and it was a stained and lacquered design with a knot design that looks really cool but what happens is when you start to paint it and what's popular now is painting them white you're going to see really dark shadows all over the place and first the first time i ever painted a set of cabinets like that i thought wow it's gonna look really cool with these knots i painted them it didn't look really cool with the knots at all it looked really unfinished the knots stood out really bad because they were basically a black shadow in the white cabinets and so we went back and refilled it and refilling knots is another time consuming process it's not as timing consuming as grain filler because you're filling the grain on the entire cabinet but you're just finding the knots and we fill them with spackle first so one coat of spackle then we go over with two coats of bondo sand that and then the knot will be completely eliminated and you do have to go over it with what we call bondo glazing putty not bondo it's bondo glazing putty and it's an automotive product and if you use that product two coats and sand it properly you won't ever see where that knot was what you don't want to do is not get it coat enough and with enough bondo or sparkle where do you actually see an indentation where that knot is because that won't look good either but i charge ten dollars per door or drawer on a naughty alder set of kitchen cabinets as an additional charge so on top if the if i was charging the doors it's 115 dollars per door if it's naughty alder i'm gonna add ten dollars to that so it's gonna be a hundred and twenty five dollars per door uh if they're naughty alder we got a drawer front it'd be 95 dollars per drawer front add ten dollars for that it's gonna be a hundred and five dollars to eliminate any knots uh if it's a naughty dollar cabinet now if you had a drawer and it didn't have any knots in it but other ones did then i wouldn't charge that additional charge for that door or drawer so while we're on the subject of filling holes i'll talk another about another scenario we've run into several times where the customer wants to eliminate the door knob holes this doesn't have any door knobs or just open by grabbing the doors the door itself the top or the drawer front the bottom of it if the customer is eliminating door knobs or poles and or changing location you're going to have to fill those holes and if you use just sparkle and spackle it sand it you will be able to see where that um that hole was what you need to do once again like a naughty alder you need to spackle it and i use um crawford's i don't use like um a lightweight spackle i use crawford's interior exterior spackle which is more of a heavy duty spackle and doesn't shrink as much i'm going to fill the holes then i'm going to put two coats of bondo glazing putty on top of that sand it check it at an inspection light and be very very critical because you don't want to do is paint the door and see an indentation where that pull hole was so it does take spackle two coats of bondo to eliminate it it is time consuming and i have a price for that and the price to do a whole set of kitchen cabinets is a flat fee of 250 so let me talk about another fee that i have an additional charge and that is multi-colors this is something that you don't run into very often but i have run into it where they want the bottom set of kitchen cabinets white and they want the top set of kitchen cabinets gray or they want the kitchen cabinets white and on island gray and it doesn't sound like that big of a deal but it's loading and reloading colors and cleaning up and changing colors and ordering two gallons instead of one gallon so you have a little bit left of your two gallons instead of just one gallon so the paint there's going to be additional cost in paint you have to take that into consideration and i have an additional charge for multi-colored kitchen cabinets and that's 200 if you want more than one color in your kitchen or wherever you're actually painting the cabinets i mean i keep referring to kitchens but it could be it could be a vanity it could be a laundry room there's it could be an entertainment center or a lot of different case scenarios but we're it's most of this is really geared towards kitchen cabinets because that's the bulk of what we paint when it comes to cabinets so here's another scenario you're going to run into and this is a door this is a recessed panel door right here and it's got a a gap and it has a floating panel right here and there's uh mult a couple different schools of thoughts should you caulk them should you not caulk them i won't get into that if you want to know my opinion about caulking floating panel doors you can go check out my video that's part of this series of caulking floating panel doors and what's my opinion and can you have success doing it but i do have a price for doing um or caulking panel doors now it's pretty rare that i would ever caulk a recessed panel door or floating panel door anymore there is some liability issues with it so you got to determine your climate where you're at does that panel truly float or is it locked in there and sealed do you live in a moist climate a dry climate take all that stuff into consideration before you ever start painting floating paneled or recessed panel doors because if there's any movement and the type of coating you're putting over the top i use water-based pu's which are more flexible than lacquers so they're less likely to crack around the caulking but what you don't want to do is caulk this door paint this door and have it crack and have to deal with that later on down the road due to expansion and contraction of the wood but if i'm caulking doors and um not drawers that you could have a recessed panel drawer in some cases but if i'm doing any type of caulking you know on these things i'm gonna charge my fee as ten dollars per door or drawer so i have a method that i use uh when i'm caulking these things i use a tile sponge and it's a really tight open cell sponge and i'll put a small bead of caulking on there the sponge is wet and i'll caulk that thing get a really tight bead i'll smooth it out with the sponge and then you'll have a really nice bead on the cabinet doors now you know once again there is a school of thought some guys are just you just adamantly never these doors i'm not going to be caulking these doors i like the look of it without it caulk but there are situations where previously painted cabinets have paint bridging over the gaps and if you're painting them white it could look really ugly so are you going to be caulking them make sure you use the right caulking make sure you're right use the right top coat make sure you're in the right climate and then make sure you charge for it because it is additional work it is a time consuming to get it nice neat and tight so once again i charge ten dollars per door or drawer and if there's any type of caulking that would be on the face frames or the side panels that would be included in the door or drawer front price so another little thing you'll run into occasionally and i do charge more for it and it's going to be a inserted glass door and you'll see doors like this instead of a panel it'll have glass so it can be used to display like china or stuff like that and every now and then you'll run into a kitchen that'll have two of them on one of the boxes to be able to display stuff inside that box and those doors usually have you know something that runs you run into that's an issue whether it's removing the glass or masking the glass and deal with it one time we had to remove the glass on there was no way to paint around them but we couldn't remove the glass we needed to take it to a glass shop to remove it and have it reinstalled after we are done and so you definitely anytime you're dealing with glass just the simple liability that you could break it is um something you know you need to add an additional charge too and if i have a door that has glass in it my typical door price for a door is a hundred and fifteen dollars per door if there's glass in it i charge 145 dollars per door and that's going to have that built-in liability what if i break the glass what if the glass has to be removed by a glass shop or just the time masking the glass and dealing with the glass paint bleeding onto the glass getting onto it so definitely have an additional charge for glass inserted doors there's one more thing that i have additional charge for now occasionally um this isn't the greatest example but inside the boxes every now and then you're going to run into a customer that wants the inside painted most of the time the insides of them are white melamine and it's never a great idea to paint melamine if you're painting the side which is some type of melamine on the side you definitely want to prime it with something like um xim uma as a great primer the inside of the boxes if they're melamine and they're adamant you paint them you really need to be priming them with something proper like uma primer but inside the boxes are not easy to spray they're tight spaces hard to get in there you're getting a lot of overspray kicking back at you and it's just not as easy as taking a cabinet door and spraying a cabinet door down or spraying it up very simple it's very controlled inside the boxes getting 100 coverage not getting runs and just spraying it is not easy to do and once you've done one set you'll realize why you need to charge additional money for the inside of boxes or cabinets so when it comes to the inside of the boxes i have another just built-in um or not built in an additional price it's thirty dollars per door or drawer for um cab doing the inside of the boxes so if i got a door right here it's a 30 additional charge so i got a door and a drawer right here so it's going to be 60 dollars and that's going to cover that area so if i'm doing this whole inside of this thing i'm going to count the doors and drawers right there add 30 for each that's what it's going to take to paint the inside of the box now of course this thing has been ripped out pulled out it's easy to spray the inside of that so that's where the human element comes into play well 30 dollars might not you know be appropriate for that situation and so when it comes to the bidding process once again there's always this human element that needs to be took it into consideration you could have all these built-in charges um or these additional charges i could have a hundred fifteen dollars per door ninety-five dollars per drawer and the bid comes out to five thousand dollars but i don't have any work for the next three months and i really got to pay my house payment the human element is going to tell me i need to lower my price you know possibly to be competitive to get the job or you're booked out for three months and you know you've got too much work on your hands you really should be increasing your price because maybe your price is too low you really should know your numbers where you're at where you live because one thing you don't want to do is take 150 15 per door 95 dollars per drawer and apply that say in california in la or um manhattan and new york because you would be missing the boat by about 50 you know on what you're charging because there's certain um you know geographical locations where the prices are going to be higher and then there's certain places where possibly the prices will be lower so you really have to understand where you're at and what the going rate for is and once you figure out the going rate you can um adjust you know or not adjust from there if you have no idea what it is you can just start…