Hi Everyone!
Hope you all are off to a great week. Its ugly and rainy in my neck of the woods today, but that’s neither here nor there. Now Ive divulged all the dirty details of the upper cabinets lets get into how I completed the lower cabs.
The process for painting the lower cabs was fairly similar to that of the uppers with the exception that I started fresh from the beginning. The Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations kit came with a deglosser that replaced the need to sand and I actually liked that step so I wanted to keep it pretty much the same on the lower cabinets. Sanding was NOT an option (primarily because I didn’t want to deal with the mess of it) so I decided on the next best thing: Liquid Sander.
This stuff is great. It was super inexpensive, easy to use, and really effective. After I cleaned the frames and doors with hot soapy water and dried them with a lint free cloth I rubbed on the liquid sander and was ready to get painting.
I primed everything with the Zinsser Cover Stain and moved on the paint. The upper cabinets were painted with Ben Moore’s Aura and I decided on Ben Moore’s Advance for the lowers. I know some of you are probably wondering why I would choose to use two different products, but I really wanted to try out the Advance. I went to a different Benjamin Moore location this time around and the salesperson said that Advance was her favorite product for cabinets so I decided to go for it. I opted for the Semi Gloss finish in the color Anchor Gray.
Here are the deets on the Advance paint: (pulled from the website)
ADVANCE offers the application and performance of traditional oil paint in a waterborne formula that cleans up with soap and water. It is a 100% alkyd formula water-dispersible alkyd developed with proprietary new resins that keep VOCs low even after tinting. It flows and levels like a traditional alkyd with the extended open-time required to achieve high-end finishes. ADVANCE is available in unlimited colors, giving you more ways than ever to achieve the perfect look on every job.
This paint also dries extremely hard which is perfect for kitchen cabinetry because it tends to take a beating!.
The verdict: Benjamin Moore does it again!! Absolutely LOVE it. I only have 1 issue with it. The recoat time with this formula is 14 hours where as the Aura is only 1 hour so if you plan on using it, plan on giving yourself plenty of time to get it done. It took me 4 days to finish the lower cabinets and frames because I could only do 1 coat per day and I gave the doors 2 coats per side. The finished product was completely worth the wait, though. I love the results. Here are the cabs after the second coat:
