A cabinet enamel, never a wall paint. We spray your kitchen for $2,000 to $6,500, or $100 to $250 per door and drawer front. Anything sold for walls stays soft, and on a door edge that gets a thumbnail every day it marks permanently.
The question people put to Custom Cabinets Lynn is usually about a brand, and the two decisions that will actually show on your doors in five years are the sheen and how long you can leave the kitchen alone. Get those two right and either of the enamels we spray will work for you.
Sheen first, because it is the one you have to live with. A flat or matte finish on your cabinet holds the oil off fingers and shows every wipe mark around the handle. Satin and semi-gloss shed that, and they let a damp cloth do what a scouring pad would otherwise have to. On a family kitchen we steer you to semi-gloss on the doors even when the sample looked too shiny in the store.
Color is the second one, and white is where it goes wrong. Traditional oil enamel ambers, so a white door laid down today reads cream in about four years and reads cream unevenly, because the doors nearest the window shift at a different rate. Both of the waterborne products we use hold their white.
Your primer is decided before any of that. On a home built before 1978, 454 CMR 22.00 puts the room under lead-safe work rules once we disturb more than 6 square feet of painted surface. It also rules out the open flame and the high-heat gun that would otherwise take your doors back to bare wood. So your old finish stays on the door and the new enamel bonds to it, which is why we lay a separate bonding primer rather than trusting a self-priming all-in-one.
Then the schedule. Benjamin Moore ADVANCE recoats at 16 hours, and Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel recoats at 4, which decides whether your kitchen is back on Friday or the following week. Neither reaches full hardness before 30 days, so we ask you to keep the shelves light for the first 3 to 5 days whichever one goes on.
Our cabinet cost guide carries the painting tables, and spraying against brushing covers how the coating gets onto the door.
Related questions
Can I use the same paint as my trim?
Usually yes, and often you should. Both of the enamels we spray are trim products, so your doors and your casings can match exactly. What does not transfer is a wall paint, which stays soft and takes a mark from a fingernail months after it looked dry.
Does a primer really need to be a separate product?
On kitchen doors, yes. A self-priming enamel is bonding to whatever film your cooking has left behind, and that is the failure that peels a cheap job at the handle inside a season. We degrease, then use a bonding primer, then color.
What about the inside of the boxes?
We leave your box interiors alone unless you ask. Painting them adds labor and a cure window to a job whose whole appeal is speed, and nothing inside a closed cabinet is doing any work for how the kitchen looks.