by Eric Deeter
Our Search for New Paint
Tell the story of changes in paint products
Are you tired of living with shabby and dated kitchen cabinets? You’re living in the 2000’s now. But your kitchen cabinets are stuck in 1999.
You can make your kitchen look fresh and new again. Have a kitchen that shows the style and who you are in this decade!
We can show you how.
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Kitchen Cabinet Refinishing Disasters in Kansas City!
“Can you come see if you can fix this mess?”
We get calls like this every once in a while. Sometimes we’ve been able to rescue a client from disaster. But one kitchen disaster stands out! The video below shows some of the mess.
Your garage shouldn’t be a contractor’s spray paint booth!
The same goes for your living room, your dining room, your basement, and your kitchen.
Some contractors are so smooth talking that they might convince you to use part of your house to spray paint on your kitchen cabinet doors and drawers. There are a few here in Kansas City that take over big parts of your house or your whole garage to refinish your kitchen cabinets.
This can go wrong quickly! You might be finding stray paint in your house months or even years later.
Faster and cheaper may not be better.
I’m amazed at how many painters never use primer. They assure you it’s not needed. They tell you, “The paint is made to stick!”
Your kitchen will probably look new and fresh when they finish. But you’ll notice the lack of primer a few months later. Oh, most of the paint will still stick to your kitchen cabinets. But the doors and drawers you handle the most will have paint missing in places.
Our process is different.
First, we take time to do the job right. We clean your kitchen cabinets, doors and drawers before we do anything else.
We take the doors and drawers to our studio so we can spray our primer and paint without making a mess in your kitchen. We lightly sand and thoroughly inspect the doors and drawers for places the lacquer finish has broken down. We look for loose joints and use glue and clamps to make the doors solid again.
The doors and drawers get a second cleaning before we prime and paint.
Second, we don’t kick you out of your kitchen. You can use your kitchen, except for when we’re right there working on your kitchen cabinets.
We use the best quality products so your kitchen will still look good years from now.
Third, we help you choose a color that works for your kitchen. Brenda is a certified True Color Expert.
We’ve seen some Kansas City kitchen refinish disasters come from a painter picking out a random “off white” that made the rest of the kitchen look dingy.
We can help you love your kitchen again.
Give us a call. We’ll be glad to help you make your kitchen feel new and fresh again.
Call: 913-441-5508
Why we decided to only paint cabinets in Kansas City
We stay focused on painting kitchen cabinets
You have a lot of choices for hiring a cabinet painting company in the Kansas City area. The design trend for painted kitchen cabinets caused a lot of interest to fill the demand. House painters will tell you, “Yes, we paint cabinets!” They weren’t all that interested in cabinets before.
Others have jumped into the cabinet painting market too. These are people who have some level of DIY skills and think painting cabinets is an easy way to make money.
Spreading too thin
On the other hand we’ve seen companies expand from refinishing cabinets to offering total kitchen remodeling. Now they offer granite or quartz counter tops, tile back splash replacement as well as painting. They say it’s a convenience so you have a one-stop shop.
We’re doing what we’re good at
We made the decision to stay focused on what we’re good at. Yes, we know enough about kitchen remodeling that we could do it all. But we’d have to hire sub-contractors for everything but the painting. And the time we’d spend managing the job would be a distraction from giving you a great finish for your cabinets.
Too many people cut corners
We’ve had more calls this year to fix problems with other people’s poor quality. The sad fact is that a lot of old-time painters rush through a job and cut corners. And newbie painters just don’t know enough to do the job right.
When the paint is chipping off in a few months, or sometimes a few weeks, we know someone cut corners.
Of course you can’t expect paint to be like Captain America. It will chip if you hit it hard enough. But when we do additional work for our clients, the cabinet painting we did still looks good after several years of normal use.
We give you good quality and value
Your kitchen is usually the hub of your home. When you want help making it a place you love again, give us a call. We can help you be sure the job is done right.
Call us now: 913-441-5508
A Certified TrueColour Expert
Getting Color Right
Brenda has a natural instinct when it comes to color. A friend refers to her as the “Rainman” of color. Her eye for color set us apart from other Kansas City artists back when our main business was faux finishing. And it still gave our clients huge benefits when kitchen cabinet refinishing became the center of our business.
Brenda was always able to make our cabinet refinishing work just the right color to make the counter top, back splash, walls and floor harmonize perfectly.
Now Brenda has upped her game. She recently attended Specify Colour with Confidence True Colour Expert™ Training taught by international color expert Maria Killam. Professional training added to natural instincts is what makes a true professional.
Not your typical cabinet finishers
Many of our clients tell us that other cabinet refinishers merely ask them what they want the final finish to look like. They’re surprised when Brenda takes time to look at all the new colors first. She considers the counter top and backsplash that might be replaced. She looks at the wall color and the floor. Then she makes recommendations for a cabinet finish that will fit with all of them.
You don’t want to make the mistake of picking an off-white that clashes. There are hundreds of off-whites to choose from, and getting just the right undertones for your space is tricky.
Or, if you’re staying with the natural wood grain finish, you don’t want it to clash with the floor.
We get it right
Brenda’s certification as a True Color expert made her even better at getting the right color for your kitchen. She has a new set of tools to make our services even better.
You can also hire her to do a color consultation for the other areas of your home besides the kitchen. Getting you the best colors for your space is what she does.
Why We Don’t Use Lacquer on Kitchen Cabinets
Home builders in Kansas City love putting lacquer finishes on custom kitchen cabinets. Lacquer finishes are fast, easy and cheap. A moderately skilled painter can spray lacquer on kitchen cabinets and woodwork and get good-looking finishes. Your new kitchen cabinets sparkle like a jewel. The difference is that a jewel looks good even after 10 years. Your lacquer finished cabinets won’t.
Once your house is ten years old you will notice the kitchen cabinets looking shabby. The original lacquer starts to break down, especially around your sink, stove and coffee maker. Lacquer doesn’t hold up to water and steam. And if you have the yellow oak cabinets so common in the Kansas City area, your yellow cabinets will now be some shade of ugly orange. Any wood with a stained finish will change color with age. The yellow oak changes to orange. The orange color will come even with an oil poly finish. The problem we see is that lacquer finishes also break down after 8 years or so.
Kansas City is full of yellow oak kitchen cabinets. You may have inherited the kitchen cabinets when you bought your home. However it happened, you end up with a worn and dated kitchen.
Doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Refinishing kitchen cabinets is a big deal in Kansas City because so many people want a cost-effective solution to yellow oak cabinets. Some companies decide the best solution is putting more lacquer on your cabinets. Of course, the lacquer industry has come a long way in the past 20 years. Now the trend is to use water-borne lacquer with a catalyst hardener. It comes in colors as well as clear. And it can be tinted dark to let you keep the wood grain yet make your cabinets appear to have a walnut or darker stain.
One of our suppliers started using and selling a water-borne lacquer and raved to us about how well it worked. We decided to test it out. We weren’t impressed. It might stand up better to water better. But the big problem is that it dries brittle.
We’ve just repaired one of these lacquer finishes. It looked great when the painter finished. But it’s chipping off now. And he chipping started less than a year after they paid to have the work done.
Any finish will mar if you hit it hard enough. But lacquer chips too easily. We also saw cracks in the finish at the joints in the doors. Wood expands and contracts depending on the humidity in your home. The Kansas City dry winters always cause kitchen cabinet doors to shrink. The brittle nature of lacquer causes it to break when this happens.
Our process gives better results
We’re willing to look at new products, but we value durability and long-life over ease of use. Companies that use lacquer like it because it’s quick for them, and it looks good when they’re finished. But it might not look so good a few years down the road.
We’re doing more work for a client we helped 8 years ago and their cabinets still look great. You have to remember there is still wood under our finish. It will dent or gouge if you hit it hard enough. But we’ll continue to use tough, durable finishes and do our work by hand. Our products and processes give great looking results that last.