Oh contrare, mon frere. It takes a lot of preparation to make this puppy work.
First clean and sand (rough up) your cabinets if you are refinishing exiting cabinets. If you are painting brand new cabinets as we did, I am not sure that the cleaning part is necessary, and since these came from the factory ready to stain, they didn't need much sanding either. Paul still ran over them with a clean rag and paint thinner just in case. If you are painting existing cabinets, then invest in a good degreaser/cleaner.
Second, prep your work area. If you are spraying cabinets, you don't want to have to clean paint up from all over the place now do you? We briefly talked about spraying the inside of the cabinets white also, but decided it would look odd. (Plus the cabinets that come from Kraft Maid painted are not painted on the inside). See example below.
Of course that is Paul's prep work. The average DIYer might not go to that extreme.
Then you spray your primer, and remember, cheap paint makes a cheap finished project. Kitchen after primer has been sprayed. We used Zinsser oil base primer. Paul has also used Kilz Premium oil based primer. Why he used Zinnser I am not sure, but he was very happy with the results.
Then you wait, and wait and wait for the primer to dry (the can says it is ready to top coat in one hour, so I think Paul was sandbagging) . Then you sand again for a smooth finish and add a second coat if necessary. Then you wait, wait and wait again (sandbagging again I assume).
Lightly sand, and then take your handy, dandy spray gun or brush and put the actual paint color on. We used a enamel based paint on ours. If you want durability, oil base is the way to go. More expensive, but it shows.
Now Paul had purchased this inexpensive HVLP paint gun for $12.95 that a friend who paints motorcycles suggested. Believe it or not that inexpensive little gun worked extremely well. Here are photos of Paul in the garage painting the doors.
Notice the easel that the doors are sitting on. He built that himself in order to hold the doors while painting. Now the doors have to lie flat until dry. We couldn't keep them in garage because the bugs and creepy crawlies would land on the doors and then he would have had to start all over again. So, he worked out a system, the doors would come in the kitchen and sit on the counters, paint cans, the island, etc. And how did we know when the doors were ready to come in? Like in the musical Sweeney Todd, he knocked three times and we opened the door and the doors came in. However, unlike Sweeney Todd, there was no bloodshed, as long as we didn't hit the doors on something.
Here they are resting comfortably to dry. After the doors and cabinets were dry, Paul set the doors and drawers in place and had me go around and mark where I wanted worn places so that they looked older (remember, I wanted them to look like they were in my grandmother's kitchen) so I had to diagram every spot that I wanted sanded. Now our vacation was coming up so Paul packed them in the car and took them with us on our vacation to Colorado so that he could sand on them, he didn't want to lose a weeks worth of time while gone from home (talking about anal, geez!) and then the doors were "pinstriped" for lack of a better word. We decided not to glaze over the whole door, but rather used a burnt umber glaze in the nooks and crannies of the doors. Once that is dry, the a polyurethane finish is sprayed on to protect the cabinets and doors.
The one thing you need to remember in painting cabinets - Patience is a virtue.
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