Like all coating projects, the prep work is about 90% of the job. You will want to have indoor floor space, tarps, and spare time. You should also have high quality brushes for the best finish, use a natural bristle brush for all oil-based paints and a poly-synthetic brush for all latex paints. For best results you should disassemble your cabinet doors, remove the drawers, remove all the hardware and put aside for safe keeping. You should always paint with the temperature near 70* Fahrenheit and the humidity at 50% or lower. You should lay all of the doors flat on a tarp on the floor. You will need to leave them there for a while, so make sure it is not in a high traffic area. For all bare wood we recommend using a base coat of an oil-based primer. Apply 1 coat as per label directions and let fully dry. When dry, flip the doors and primer the other sides. Again, let the primer fully dry before handling. You will want to use a high quality, interior, latex, paint for best results. When painting the cabinets on the wall, you should pay special attention not to over apply any paint on the inside of the door or drawer frames. Applying too many products will reduce the clearance space designed to allow the doors and drawers to close and open properly.
A semi-gloss or a gloss will provide you with the most durable, washable, longest lasting color retention. At this point you should apply one thin even coat of latex paint and let dry as per label directions. If you are not using one-coat coverage paint, you will want to wait a minimum of 4 hours before applying the second coat. When dry, flip the doors and paint the opposite side. Let the painted cabinets dry for a minimum of 48 hours before handling. You want to make sure the paint is dry enough to handle otherwise it may smudge and peel. Although latex paint dries to the touch in a matter of hours, it takes a full 30 days to chemically cure. You do not want to rub or wipe the surface within the cure time as well as keeping it from getting it wet with water. Allowing water to contact the paint coating before it has had the ability to fully cure may reactivate the paint and rewet it, this in turn would allow the coating to smear and discolor. When you assemble your cabinets, you may want to have an extra set of hands to help hold everything in place as you assemble the doors and the drawers. This will help reduce the amount of dings and nicks that may occur during the assembly. Once you have all of the cabinets and hardware assembled, you may want to leave the doors swung open a little so as to keep the door from drying to the cabinet. Paint just dries, it does not know the difference between the surface it was painted on and the one it is next to. When painted objects like doors and windows stick to other painted surfaces near them, this is called ?blocking? and may occur if the surfaces spend a prolonged amount of time butted up to each other before properly dried. Following these steps should give you beautiful cabinets with years of use.