How to Paint Kitchen Cabinets with a Sprayer

I’ve always been a brush and roller kind of gal, but let me tell ya, this sprayer has been a game changer in our projects. It gives such a good finish and though the prep takes about 857 days, it’s worth it, so here’s how to paint kitchen cabinets with a sprayer.

I have a love-hate relationship with painting. I love the way it can totally transform a room with relatively little money and effort (the perfect beginner DIY to get comfortable with house projects, in our opinion), but I hate that moment when you realize painting is tedious, your back is sore and your first coat looks like trash.

HOWEVER, this last part was totally not the case when we painted our new kitchen island and lower cabinets recently because we used a sprayer. I know, I thought sprayers were reserved for professionals and enormous paint jobs, too, but turns out it’s actually really useful for all kinds of projects, so here’s how we did it.

As a disclaimer, we partnered with Wagner Spray Tech on this project but our opinions are totally our own.

Clean the cabinets really well

The island cabinets we were painting were unfinished wood and the existing lower cabinets, of course, were already finished and white. Whichever one you’ve got, you’ll prep pretty much the same way. Start by cleaning really, really well.

Use a strong cleaner and degreaser (we used this one) and some paper towel or a rag. Take off all the doors, drawers and hardware.

Pro tip: Use a small piece of painters tape in the hinge hole to label the doors so you remember which one is which, and for the drawers, you can just add painters tape to the inside. Keep the hinges in a Ziplock bag inside its corresponding cabinet.

Tape everything off

This is the part that takes forever with a sprayer, but we promise it’s worth it, if not just for the incredibly satisfying peeling of the tape at the end. The sprayer we have (the Wagner Flexio 3000) had an overspray of a few feet, so first I went around the entire base of the cabinets and added a line of tape (this one is our go-to for a really crisp line) on the floor. Then, I laid down either plastic sheeting (like this) or brown paper (like this) and I taped that sheeting to the first row of tape so I had two lines of defense going out about three feet.

The cabinet interiors were a bit trickier, but I used the same method of doing one row of only tape first, then a second row with paper or plastic taped to the first line. For the drawers, I did a line of tape around the inside box, then again, added a sheet of paper or plastic taped down covering the entire inside part of the drawer.

If you’re doing existing cabinets, make sure to cover your countertops and a few feet of the wall wherever the cabinets end to make sure there isn’t any overspray. Go over all the surfaces with a sanding block (we used 220 grit) and then a tack cloth to make sure it’s really smooth and doesn’t have any dust particles left that’ll rough up your finish.

I know, this prep is boring and repetitive, and this step took me probably four hours for all our kitchen cabinets, but I really didn’t want to mess it up. By the end, it was looking like a scene from Dexter in there.

Hang up your doors if possible

Okay, not to toot my own horn, but this was pretty genius. We temporarily installed a few of these cup hooks on what will eventually be our pergola outside, then drilled a teeny hole in the underside of the cabinet doors and installed another hook there.

I hung up the door hooks to the pergola hooks which meant I could spray both sides of the door at once and saved so much time not needing to wait for the paint to dry and flip them for the underside.

Practice with some scrap wood

Finally, time to bust out the sprayer! To be totally honest, I was really intimidated by the sprayer but once I had a practice run, it was actually pretty fun. Take a piece of scrap plywood or cardboard and set up your sprayer according to its directions. If you’re using ours, we started with the small detail nozzle but ended up using the larger nozzle for the priming. We thinned the primer just a little bit, but it’s kind of a test-as-you-go situation so I won’t give specifics on how much water we used etc.

Do a few strokes on the scrap plywood with your primer, making sure it’s coming out smooth (not sputtering) and isn’t spraying too much (there aren’t any drips). If it’s not coming out smooth and amazing, you’ll need to adjust one or maybe both of the two dials – the material flow control (the red ring around the collar part) or the air flow control (the dial on top). You might also need to thin out the paint a little more if it won’t come out evenly.

You’ve kind of got to find the sweet spot and that’ll depend on your material and how much you’ve thinned it, which is why we recommend that scrap piece to practice on before you get going.

Get to priming

Once your dials are all set up, you’re ready to go. Start on the least visible part of the cabinet (just in case there’s still a learning curve) and off you go.

A few tips for how to paint kitchen cabinets with a sprayer:

• Keep the sprayer moving while the trigger is pressed down. If you stay on any one spot too long you risk there being drips.
• Do a row of paint, then on the next one overlap the last by about 50%. You won’t get full coverage on the first line you do, so make sure you’re overlapping a little bit on each row to get full coverage on the part you’ve just done.
• Keep the sprayer as level as possible, which means don’t tilt it down as you’re getting to the bottom or up as you’re getting to the top. This will mean you probably need to do some weird crouching and movements but it’s a big factor in keeping the coverage even.
• At each end (if you’re spraying horizontally) or at the top/bottom (if you’re going vertically), keep moving the sprayer a little bit past your cabinets before changing direction and coming back to the next row. This will also help avoid drips because you won’t be doubling back over the edge of your cabinet as you move to your next spot, if that makes sense.
• If you start getting splotchy coverage and you haven’t run out of paint in the tub, stop the sprayer and wipe off the tip of the nozzle because there might be some build-up.

Clean out the sprayer

Cleaning out the sprayer was actually really easy, no more difficult or time consuming than cleaning out a paint brush or a roller in my opinion. Take apart the whole nozzle and keep running warm water through each part until it runs clear. Our sprayer also came with a little brush to get into all the teeny spots that was really helpful. Leave it all to dry while your primer dries.

Another pro tip: Get a few of these liners to cut down your cleanup time.

Get to painting

So yeah, priming was probably pretty fun and you felt like a badass with your paint sprayer, but getting your actual new cabinet color on is the best part!

It’s the same process as with priming, but we’d recommend grabbing another scrap piece and testing all your settings again. Before you get going, grab a sanding block and run it over your whole surface to make sure it’s really smooth after the primer coat, then wipe it all down with a tack cloth so you don’t have any dust particles on the surface.

For us, the primer was a bit thicker than the paint so we did have to adjust the flow down a little bit to stop the overspray and use less water for thinning it out.

Then, go ahead and start spraying! Make sure to be as even as possible with your strokes and stay consistent.

We did two coats of the paint and sanded again lightly in between coats.

Another pro tip right from Wagner: You can leave the sprayer for a couple of hours between coats and if you’re worried about it drying out, wrap the nozzle in a damp cloth while you wait.

It’s time for the satisfying peel

When the paint has dried for about 30 minutes but hasn’t fully dried, peel up your tape and plastic. Be careful not to let any of the painted part of the paper or plastic touch the unpainted part of the cabinet in case it smudges, though.

Re-attach the doors and hardware

After you’ve given everything adequate time to dry (like, a couple of days if you can), carefully add the hinges back to the doors and slide the drawers back on in their place. If you removed your baseboards to paint like we did, reattach those, too. Add your hardware back on and you’re done! Now you know how to paint kitchen cabinets with a sprayer.

Be careful with the fresh paint for a couple of weeks because it’s easy to scratch or scrape until it fully cures, so no slamming doors or drawers for a while.

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