How to paint kitchen cabinets

What you need

• Sugar soap or degreaser
• 180 and 240 grit sandpaper
• Adhesion primer suited to laminate or melamine
• Water-based enamel topcoat
• Small foam roller and a quality brush
• Painter's tape, drop sheets
• Screwdriver, labelled bags for hardware

Step by step

1. Take everything off and label it

   Doors, drawer fronts, handles, hinges. Number the back of every door in pencil and bag the hardware by number. Painting doors on the cabinet gives you drips, missed edges and painted hinges.

2. Degrease harder than you think you need to

   Kitchen cabinets carry years of airborne cooking oil, especially above the cooktop. Sugar soap the lot, twice, and rinse. Paint will not stick to grease and this is the most-skipped step in the whole job.

3. Sand to a dull finish

   180 grit until the sheen is gone everywhere. You are not removing the surface, just keying it. Wipe off all the dust with a tack cloth.

4. Prime with the right primer

   Laminate and melamine need a dedicated adhesion primer — standard undercoat will peel. One thin, even coat. Let it cure for the full time on the tin, not just until it feels dry.

5. Two thin topcoats, sanded between

   Water-based enamel, applied with a foam roller for the flats and a brush for the profiles. Two thin coats beat one thick one every time. Light sand with 240 grit between coats and de-dust.

6. Cure before reassembly

   Water-based enamel is touch dry in hours but takes up to a week to fully harden. Rehang the doors after a couple of days, but treat them gently and avoid cleaning them for a week or two.

Find out what your doors are made of first

This determines whether the job works, and it takes thirty seconds.

Melamine or vinyl-wrapped MDF. Most Australian kitchens built from the 1990s onward. A hard, non-porous, factory-finished surface that paint has nothing to grip. These absolutely can be painted, but only with a proper adhesion primer — this is the case where skipping primer guarantees failure.

Timber or timber veneer. Older and higher-end kitchens. The most forgiving to paint, and the one case where a light sand and a standard undercoat is genuinely enough.

Two-pack polyurethane. A very hard sprayed finish, common on newer high-gloss kitchens. Difficult to overpaint by brush and get a result you are happy with. Honestly assess whether you want this outcome before you start.

Check the edges of a door for a wrap seam or a glued-on edge strip — that tells you it is wrapped MDF rather than solid timber. If the vinyl is already lifting at a corner near the oven, painting will not fix that, and heat will keep lifting it.

Take the doors off. Every time.

Painting doors in place produces runs on the verticals, a visible line where the brush met the carcass, and paint on your hinges. It also means you cannot paint the edges properly, and the edges are what people touch.

Number every door and its corresponding carcass with masking tape as it comes off — kitchen doors are not interchangeable even when they look identical, and hinge plates have been adjusted to their own door over years. Bag the hardware for each door with the same number.

Lay them flat on trestles or paint cans, not leaning against a wall. Flat is what gives you a self-levelling finish without runs.

Degrease, and then degrease again

Kitchen doors carry an invisible film of cooking oil, and it is heaviest exactly where you least want a paint failure: around the cooktop and above the rangehood. Paint over it and the finish will lift in sheets months later.

Sugar soap and hot water, twice, with a rinse in between. The second pass is not belt-and-braces — the first one lifts the bulk and redistributes the rest. Pay particular attention to the door faces nearest the cooktop and the tops of the doors, where grease settles and nobody wipes.

Sanding is about key, not about removing the finish

You are not stripping anything. You are dulling the surface so primer has something mechanical to hold. If the doors were painted before about 1970, do not dry-sand them — paint that old can contain lead, and sanding it makes lead dust. Test it or have them stripped professionally instead. Otherwise: 180 to 220 grit, evenly, until the whole face has lost its sheen — an orbital sander for the flats, by hand into the profiles and the corners.

Any glossy patch you miss is a future chip, and the eye finds those patches unerringly once the paint is on. Then vacuum the doors and wipe with a tack cloth or a barely damp lint-free rag. Dust under paint looks exactly like dust under paint.

Primer is the whole job

On melamine, vinyl or laminate you need a bonding or adhesion primer specifically sold for those substrates. Not a general undercoat. This is where money should go and where the failures come from — a good primer under a mid-range topcoat outperforms an expensive topcoat over the wrong primer, every time.

Two thin coats beat one thick one. Let the primer cure for the time on the tin rather than the time you would like, and give it a very light 320-grit rub between coats to knock back any raised texture.

Topcoat, and the Melbourne winter problem

Use a water-based enamel made for cabinetry and trim. Modern ones level well, hold up to cleaning, and do not yellow the way old oil-based enamels did on white doors.

Now the part almost nobody writes about. These paints have a stated application range — commonly around 10°C minimum and below about 80% relative humidity. A Melbourne garage in July is regularly outside both. Paint applied below its minimum temperature does not simply dry slowly; the film does not coalesce properly and you get a finish that stays soft, marks under a fingernail and chips at every edge.

If you are doing this between May and August, work inside the house rather than the garage, and give each coat considerably longer than the tin suggests. This job is much easier in spring, and if you can wait, wait.

Cure time is not dry time, and doors are the proof

Touch-dry in an hour and recoatable in four does not mean hardened. Cabinet enamels commonly reach full hardness in one to three weeks, and during that window the film is soft.

So: rehang the doors after a couple of days if you must have a working kitchen, but do not stack doors face to face, do not tape anything to them, and expect to be gentle for a fortnight. Most 'the paint chipped straight away' stories are doors that were put back into hard service on day two.

What this does and does not fix

Paint changes the colour and the feel of a kitchen dramatically for a few hundred dollars in materials and a long weekend. It is the best value change in this entire guide list.

It does not fix doors that are swollen at the bottom from a dishwasher leak, hinges that no longer hold alignment, a benchtop that has failed, or a layout that does not work. Painting tired doors on a sound kitchen is excellent value. Painting doors on a kitchen that needs replacing is a weekend spent making a decision later.

Common mistakes

• Skipping or rushing the degrease
• Using standard undercoat on laminate
• Painting doors while they are still hanging
• Thick coats to save time — they stay soft and chip at the edges
• Reassembling before the paint has hardened

Questions people ask

Do I really need a special primer for melamine?

Yes. Melamine is a hard non-porous surface with nothing for standard paint to key into. An adhesion primer is the entire difference between a finish that lasts years and one that peels off in sheets when someone catches it with a fingernail.

Brush, roller or spray?

A small foam or microfibre roller on the flats with a good brush cutting into the profiles gives a very acceptable finish. Spraying is better and adds masking, equipment and overspray. Do not brush a large flat door in one direction with a wide brush — the marks show.

Can I paint the carcasses too?

Yes, and you should, or the inside edges will not match. They are harder to do neatly because you cannot lay them flat, so take your time on the visible front edges — those are what people see with the doors closed.

How long before it looks tired again?

A well-prepared, properly primed cabinet paint job holds up for years. Around the cooktop and on the doors people open with wet hands it will wear first — which is also where your degreasing was most likely to have been imperfect.

Is it worth it, or should I just replace the doors?

Replacement doors on existing carcasses are the next step up in both cost and result, and they make sense when the doors themselves are damaged rather than dated. If the doors are sound and just old-fashioned, paint is remarkable value.

This guide is general information, not advice for your particular house. Rules change — check the current position with the Building and Plumbing Commission, Energy Safe Victoria and WorkSafe Victoria before you rely on it. Plumbing, gas and electrical work must be done by a licensed practitioner. If your home was built or last renovated before 1990, assume asbestos until it is ruled out — see what a strip-out finds.