kitchen cabinets

[lilbit]

i have a 01 28x56 DB that i love. however the kitchen cabinets, i wish was a different color. i do not want to rip them out so i was told by my MIL that works with a painter to paint them. they are the laminate type. i would love a mahogny or cherry color. she sells to use a high end primer and then paint them. is that all that needs to be done to them to get them ready?

i have actually took a piece of laminate moulding removed from a closet and primed it and then painted it-and it looks good. im just scared to start a large project like this to find out i did something wrong. BTW i would probaly pay her to do the work

[David Oxhandler]

"Your kitchen cabinets take more abuse than any other piece of woodwork in your home. They are opened and closed innumerable times a day, and they are located in the room where the air conditions would be destructive to any kind of woodwork. In one moment the room can be very dry - like when your oven is on a high temperature for a long period of time - and a few minutes later the room can be near 100 percent humidity when you start steaming vegetables or boil a large pot of water".... see more of this articel at http://www.doityourself.com/stry/paintkitchencabinets

[lilbit]

so i should sand,then prime?

[Deb]

I woudl be interested in this process....the article sounded like they were dealing with wood cabinets. Mine are laminate as well, or some kind of manmade material. Is the process the same as with wooden cabinets? I hope lilbit keeps us posted as to the success of this project.

[David Oxhandler]

If you have laminate cabinets, then the wood beneath is a poor quality particle board. It wouldn't be easy to remove and the final door would look wretched. But there is an alternative or two. Most home stores sell a couple of products that can be put over your laminate and stained to look like real wood. The first is a 1/4" veneered plywood. Only the final layer is "perfect" wood finish. You can have it cut at the store (just a 1/2"-1" larger than the actual door size), then take it home and adhere it to your cabinet doors with Liquid Nails and clamps (or lay them flat and use heavy books to weigh them down) until it dries (about 2 hours). Then use a small handheld router with a laminate bit to trim around the edges. Sand it with 180 sand paper, smoothing the edges and smoothing the surface. Remember to sand with the grain. Wipe it with a tack cloth, then stain and seal with 2-3 coats of polyurethane to seal it, sanding lighting between coats and wiping with a tack cloth. Hubby and I just refaced our cabinets this way and the whole kitchen was under $100 and the final product was just beautiful red oak cabinets. Each sheet of veneer plywood was $29 for a 4'x8' sheet.

The other product is a little more expensive, but very easy to work with (a 24" x 48" sheet runs around $35). It's a laminate that you can put over your existing laminate, except this one is a wood veneer that you iron on and trim with a router. In addition, you can finish your base frame with 1"-2" veneer tape that goes on the same way. Then you stain and poly just like regular wood. In our case, for 9 doors, the frames, etc, it would have cost about $125 to do it this way. The other way worked well for us and we ended up with a very beautiful finished product. I know it sounds like a lot of work, but 2 of us did it in just a few hours of cutting, adhering and sanding, then one day of staining and varnishing. It wasn't bad at all, especially since HD did the cutting for us...we just had to take the measurements with us.

Source: Yahoo Answers