Ikea kitchen cabinets was a new combo move for us. And despite a nagging voice in our heads that asked if it was a bad idea (
), we’re extremely happy with the final result. Plus, it was pretty easy to do – no paint sprayer or fancy equipment necessary!
We’re about a month into using them every day and so far they’re holding up wonderfully. They’ve been scratched, scrubbed, kicked, and real-life tested by two kids and so far no scrapes, dings, or dents to report. They look as good as the day we freshly painted them, and as smooth as factory-made Ikea cabinets – so we’ll share how we got such even coverage.
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As we discussed in our last podcast, we wanted to replace our old kitchen cabinets to better maximize the storage along that back wall. It’s a small kitchen and, although we’d organized it carefully enough to make it work for the past two years, we knew there was room for improvement.
The skinny drawer pictured below is a great example of how inefficient the old thickly-framed cabinets were. There was so much wood framing around the drawers & doors that everything was more cramped than it needed to be. What do you even put in a drawer that’s one olive oil bottle wide?
Yes, that’s the same sized olive oil bottle in the photo below, except now it can stand up because the drawer is
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Deeper along with being significantly wider, so we can store a lot more. We knew from our previous experience with Ikea kitchens (like at our beach house) that we could get big functional gains by replacing the cabinets. For one, there’s much less thick framing around the sides of Ikea cabinets- as you can see below – plus we shifted the stove over a bit, so this drawer ended up being much more useful for us.
Not to mention that Ikea cabinets have so many customizable systems you can add (secret drawers that nest within other drawers, caddies that fit perfectly to corral things, etc). I’d say we upped our small kitchen’s efficiency by at least 50% by upgrading the cabinets. We’ll show you more about how we organized them in a future post. For now, back to the subject at hand: how we went from “Ikea white” to a custom paint color of our choosing.
The mauve feels like a fun homage to the original laminate counters and even the walls, which we discovered were once that color during our first phase of renovations before we moved in.
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Ikea doesn’t sell any doors that color and ordering paintable Semihandmade doors is significantly more expensive. Their DIY flat slab fronts would’ve cost us about $600 vs the $185 we’d pay for white flat fronts from Ikea. And we are no strangers to painting something, so it felt worth attempting this, even though laminate surfaces or slick pre-painted finishes (Ikea calls these “lacquered”) can be a little tricky. Thankfully, paint and primer “technology” is constantly improving and you can now get strong bonds, even without turning to oil-based products. So here’s exactly what we used:
We took a low-tech, low-mess approach to this project (aka: no paint sprayer) so the material list is pretty simple. Had we been painting a larger kitchen, we might’ve opted for a faster paint sprayer approach, but I personally find that we can be more methodical and careful when we hand paint a project like this.
*You can also use an electric sander for a faster result, but it takes some extra care that we’ll talk about in a moment
Painting Ikea Cabinets
If you want the quick & dirty version of this process, I had fun with this two-minute video that covers each step in a Gen Z-friendly, transition-tastic way. You won’t catch me on TikTok or making IG Reels, but I like an editing project (I was the kid in middle school making all sorts of videos with star wipes and other “fancy” effects). For the more detailed scoop, we’ve got a full written tutorial AND A MORE DETAILED VIDEO later on in the post that includes more specific tips. That one’s for all of my fellow Millennials that like to see someone talk through a project without sparing a single detail (as I’m known to do).
Since we were painting our cabinets BEFORE assembling our kitchen, we just unboxed the doors and laid everything out on a dropcloth to get started. But if you’re painting an existing kitchen you’ll want to remove all of your doors and drawer fronts first. You’ll also probably want to take the extra step of cleaning them with a liquid deglosser to remove any cooking grease or oils that may have built up on your doors and drawers.
Even if you’ve used a deglosser or liquid sandpaper, it’s still a good idea to rough up the surface with actual sandpaper to create a better surface for primer and paint adherence. Prep is really the difference between painted cabinets that last and ones that look crappy within a month. So don’t skimp on the prep, my friends. Trust me.
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Remove any of the white surface since it offers moisture protection to the MDF below. So we started carefully with a fine-grit 220 sanding block and eventually worked up to 120-grit sandpaper on our battery palm sander. I filmed the how-to videos before testing out my power sander because it should be used with cautio. You can easily sand off too much if you’re not careful- especially on the edges and corners – so I didn’t trust myself to simultaneously film and sand with it. But it can speed up this step a bit.
You want your primer to adhere to the door itself, not a layer of sanding dust, right? So we went over each door with a damp paper towel first, then a tack cloth. The slightly tacky surface of the cloth is great for grabbing fine particles before you paint or stain any surface. Be sure to get all sides.
Before we started priming and painting, we propped everything up off our dropcloth with these paint project lifters. It was my first time using them, so I was a little paranoid that they might scratch or leave marks as I flipped the doors over to work on each side. So to be totally safe I decided to FULLY PRIME & PAINT THE BACKS before doing anything to the fronts. This way I’d never have to rest the painted fronts on the lifters. That way, if the lifters did leave tiny marks somewhere, it would be on the less-important backside of the drawers (fortunately they didn’t!).
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Oh and as for the actual priming, we just used a small foam roller to apply a thin and even coat of Zinsser Bulls Eye 1-2-3 and let it fully dry for 4 hours before proceeding. Store your wet rollers in a Ziploc bag for later use.
Once our primer was fully cured, we used a fresh roller to apply two thin and even coats of paint. Again, we used Sherwin-Williams Emerald Urethane Trim Enamel based on the recommendation from the paint pro at the store. We chose a Satin finish because we like that low-sheen look. If you choose a glossier finish, just be aware that roller and brush strokes can be easier to see, so you may want to use a paint sprayer instead.
Don’t panic if your first coat looks imperfect like ours did below. I always recommend two coats for any project because it’ll give you a more consistent looking and stronger/more durable finish (and two thin and even coats are WAY better than one thick and gloppy one). So once your first coat has fully dried (we let ours dry overnight), roll on a second coat.
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You can also see above that our coverage is spotty on the sides. That was intentional. Since we were focusing only on the BACKS, we just gently rolled the sides to smooth out any drips if they occurred. Hence that weird half-painted effect on the edges above.
Why not paint the sides completely yet? Well, if you press a roller too firmly or apply too much paint against a thin edge like this, it can cause paint to collect along the underside. That’s something you might not notice until you flip things over and, in this case, that would mean a ridge or bead of paint on the front of your cabinet. So we decided to fully paint the edges while painting the fronts, that way any errant paint build-up would be on the less-important back side (spoiler alert: we didn’t have any anyway, but better to be safe than sorry!).
We gave the cabinet backs a full 24 hours to dry and harden, and then carefully flipped everything over to begin the process again on the fronts. I know this seems tedious, but we figured it was better to be slow and methodical for the best result. Remember, we really didn’t want any dings from the paint lifters on the fronts, which we worried might happen
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