Even though it’s obvious that painting your kitchen cabinets would be a huge win, usually you have one more person to convince.
We hear from a lot of customers who tell us that their husbands were very reluctant because “the cabinets are fine.”
If you remember watching reruns of The Honeymooners or its cartoon remake, The Flintstones or the slightly more modern series Home Improvement, you know that the husband may bluster and think he’s in charge, but the wife actually makes all the sane decisions. In the photo below, we can all relate to the face Alice makes.
Below are some talking points you can use to talk with anyone who doubts the wisdom of painting your kitchen cabinets.
Our cabinets are fine the way they are.
This depends on what you mean by “fine”. The 1987 Dodge Aries K Sedan was a “fine” car, but would you still be driving one?
You can’t paint this type of cabinet
We sometimes hear this when the cabinets are covered with thermofoil. Thermofoil is a surface finish applied to cabinets by many manufacturers. It is a plastic material which is thermoformed to the profile of an underlying engineered wood core such as medium-density fiberboard.
If the thermofoil is loose or peeling, we can almost always completely remove the plastic coating from the doors and then paint the underlying door and have it look great and remain durable.
If the thermofoil is in good shape and isn’t peeling, it is actually no different than painting wood doors, We lightly sand it, prime it and paint it.
I can do it myself.
This one may be true. Painting your cabinets isn’t rocket science, but there is a lot of work involved. In fact, we put together a comprehensive guide to painting your kitchen cabinets. We recommend anyone considering taking on doing it themselves read that to make sure they don’t miss any steps.
I’ll hire that guy that painted our living room.
Painting cabinets is very different than painting walls. It’s different paint and any minor imperfections become all you see.
Dana Tucker has a great blog post about one experience using a house painter to paint some cabinets.
Painting cabinets requires a different set of skills and an eye for detail that most house painters don’t need.
Cabinet painters also use a different type of paint to make sure that everything levels out and is durable for years to come.
It’s too expensive
In comparison to what? Our typical jobs end up running between $2,000 and $4,000 (our costs are based on how many doors + drawers we’re painting for you). To remove the existing cabinets and then install new cabinets in that same kitchen would fun between $12,000 and $25,000 (there’s actually a bigger range if you go with high-end cabinets). You can use an online cabinet cost estimator to see what your cost might be.
You are also without the use of your kitchen for however long the renovation takes and possibly even staying in a hotel for a week or two.
It will look low-end
We’ve now painted over 1,000 kitchens and that wouldn’t be the case if it didn’t look good. We are always happy to give you the names of past customers that you can talk with (and maybe even look at their cabinets) to put you at ease. We have complete confidence that looking at our past work will make you want to get on the schedule right away.
Look through our portfolio of past cabinet painting jobs to see the transformation our past customers experienced.
Why would you paint this beautiful wood?
This is a common comeback, and it makes sense in a perfect world. What you need to realize is that most of us live in an imperfect reality. Many of the kitchens with stained cabinets have become yellowed (become more orange) since they were installed an no longer look like the architect who spec’d them envisioned.
Below is an animated picture showing a typical transformation that we see when someone is sprucing up their kitchen.
Above you can see the original photo looks as warm as possible – it was the “for sale” photo of the kitchen. The after photo shows a much more modern and bright looking kitchen.
You can see the whole transformation here.
If everything else fails, take a minute to get a ballpark quote to paint your cabinets, if that sounds reasonable get in touch with me about exactly what you want to do. I will send you out a fully itemized quote showing every single thing we do that you can share with your spouse.
Sometimes doing all the legwork makes it seem like they would be crazy to stop a process that’s already in motion. Then you can buy him this shirt.
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