Paint a lacquered kitchen in Salford, Oxfordshire

This article covers a project where Ron Taylor was asked to paint a lacquered kitchen.

This stained and lacquered kitchen was in Salford on the Warwickshire-Oxfordshire border and the client wanted Ron to give it a new lease of life. Although it was dated and sapped some of the light out the kitchen, the cabinets were in good condition, so no major problems getting ready for painting. This is the end result.

And this is how Ron did it

Where it is feasible, we like to remove all the doors and drawers and take them back to the workshop. We can then concentrate on the main kitchen units in situ, and once the doors have been prepared and first coated, we bring them back to the kitchen for the final coats.

First step

The owner had fitted new handles to the doors prior to us starting, so we removed them and took the doors away to my workshop for prepping and painting offsite. 

All surfaces were washed down thoroughly with Krud Kutter Original, rinsed down and allowed to dry overnight.

The following day we taped 1400 grade lining paper to the floor and laid 3M Masking Film over anything that hadn’t been removed from the cupboards. This product is engineered for spray painting and has a static charge that draws dust and overspray towards it. It’s great for spraying and works extremely well for protecting surfaces from any dust.

The sanding was done with Abranet abrasive off the roll and Mirka Goldflex pads. Both are great abrasives and we keep a variety of grits on the van.

The units and floors are then thoroughly vacuumed with a Henry Hoover and brush attachment.

The doors, though not onsite, are prepared in exactly the same way.

Time for painting

This is were our process sometimes differs for static units and doors.

For brushing, we find an oil-based adhesion primer levels better than a shellac one, and as the lacquer was nicely keyed and in good shape after sanding (no burning through to the bare wood), we applied a coat of Tikkurila Otex to the units.

I always use a Corona Chinex brush in oil primer as these work very well moving heavy coatings around. On this job we used a thin No.5 Comet for the rails and a 2″ Merlin for the larger areas.

We spray the doors with Zinsser BIN, a high adhesion primer which works well through an HVLP spray, and with this method, there is no need to worry about brushmarks and levelling. It also dries lightning fast so it’s possible to coat both sides of the doors to good opacity in a day. There were 30 doors in this kitchen, so we made use of 2 Erecta Racks to stack them up to dry.

The racking system builds up one level at a time, to look something like this when loaded!

With this system we can work in quite a compact space and even if the plan isn’t to remove all the doors, there is invariably a panel or component or other that needs putting somewhere, and this is a very tidy solution.

After a light sand, a coat of Tikkurila Helmi water based primer was applied to the frames and sprayed on doors, thinned out 5-10% to aid flow. When dry, we caulk any gaps or cracks with Decorator’s Caulk.

This is were we put away the sprayer and brush everything to a finish, 2 finish coats are always applied for durability.

For thin areas we again use a No.5 Corona brush but this time it’s the softer Tynex/Orel Grande. For larger areas paint is applied fast with a Wooster Micro Plush 4.5″ roller and layed, or tipped, off with a 2″ Tynex/Orel Corona Cody or Archer brush.

Final topcoat

The doors were brought up to a first topcoat offsite and then returned and rehung prior to the final coat on the exterior.

This approach means there is a minimal disruption to your kitchen, and the doors can be brought back to your home, hung and finished the same day, without the risk of marking new paint in the fitting process.

Finally the handles were refitted and the job finished.

The new cream paint really brightened up what was quite a dark kitchen and was a nice transformation.

Deciding between primers, between topcoats, and do you want to use oil based or all water-borne… Which approach, brush, spray, all in situ, remove doors and drawers…

The job of a kitchen painter is not as cut and dry as it looks, every job may look the same but there isn’t really a set formula covering every kitchen. Each one presents different challenges, which is why it always pays to get experienced kitchen painter hands on the job.

Ron Taylor, a specialist painter and decorator based in Kenilworth, is the Traditional Painter responsible for hand painted kitchens throughout Warwickshire.

Ron is one of the UK’s leading authorities on the specification and application of water based and waterborne paints.

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