Kitchen cupboard doors
Well, I haven’t been updating very much recently – been kinda busy.
Have been repainting the doors from the kitchen cuoboards, which is a right pain. The doors were waxed, so I’ve had to get a lot of that off them before I can start painting. A combination of a hard work with wet and dry sandpaper, and a got with both white spirit and methlylated spirit with wire wool. As well as a go with some special wax remover seems to be working OK on them.
Having stripped off what I thought was all the wax, I started priming with a Farrow & Ball eco undercoat/primer. I noticed in a few places that some of the wax was coming thorugh, so ended up buying a shellac based paint (B.I.N.), which is supposed to stick to anything & block stains coming through. Its not the cheapest paint in the world (£15 / L), but seems to have done the trick. Its also useful for painting onto the formica type cupboard surfaces, as it sticks to anything to give a good base coat.
A couple more coats of undercoat and I was ready to start top-coating. Again I’m using a Farrow & Ball eco paint (eggshell) in tallow. The primer for this is the white F&B primer. I purchased this from my local paint store (a branch of Brewers), for some reason they stock a full range of eco paints, but not the undercoats, so I had to order that specially. It only took a couple of days to arrive, but you’d think that having the range of paints would mean they’d have the undercoats as well!
Anyway, both the undercoat and eggshell were quite good to work with, drying quickly and with very little smell (hence the Eco status of the paint). The eggshell is very low sheen (listed as 20% I think) and is “fully washable” according to the data sheets. Hopefully this means it will be easy to keep clean and won’t object to the odd splash of water from the sink!
The Eggshell paint has a very rich colour – I could probably have got away with just the one coat, but I wanted to make sure the cupboards have a hardwearing finish, and there were a few places I missed with the first coat.
I opted for applying the paint mostly using a foam gloss roller which gives a very fine finish and no brush marks. There’s a few places where a brush was necessary, like into the mouldings, but the paint is quite thick and the brush lines disappeared into the finish themselves.
I’ve finished phase 1 of the re-paint, that is to say I’ve done the doors from the ground level cupboards, kick-boards and some end-panels. Still have the drawer fronts and wall cupboards to do … must get around to starting on them soon!