Can you paint manufactured cabinets

Once your doors are ready, we'll show you how to prime and paint laminate cabinets. The key to getting the best paint results is preparation. Remove laminate cabinet doors from their frames and remove all hardware , including hinges. Finally, clean the doors and sand them lightly.

Use a tack cloth to make sure the doors are dust-free. Use a high-quality paintbrush to minimize stroke marks as you cut in on cabinet edges or in hard-to-reach spaces. For the doors themselves and any other large surfaces, use a roller to get a smooth, brush stroke-free finish. Once the primer has fully dried, give everything a light sanding again. Clean off the dust with a tack cloth. It dries to the touch in one hour, features a tough, chip-resistant finish, and cleans easily with mild liquid soap.

We recommend a satin finish that will hide any minor imperfections. Don't love your plain flat-front doors? Turn them into paneled cabinets with wood or composite moldings. Find moldings in various widths and designs at your local hardware store, then have them miter-cut to your specifications or do it yourself using a miter box and handsaw. When they are dry, use wood glue to adhere them to the door fronts. With the proper prep and some hard work, you can transform the look of laminate cabinets.

If your home is newer or had upgraded cabinetry installed your MDF cabinets may have a veneer, laminate, melamine, or Thermofoil over them. Clayton Homes used MDF cabinetry with paper wrapping in most of their homes until when they began using DuraCraft cabinetry. Laminate is a more expensive material but it stands up against water and wears better than most of the other options.

For high-pressure laminate, they use a 4 step process: soaking sheets of wood-grain or solid printed paper in a plastic resin, letting them dry, layering them, and then thermosetting it all together. The sheets are then cured using psi pressure that creates a very smooth and durable surface thus the name high-pressure laminate.

More expensive laminates may use plastic or foil instead of paper. They take sheets of paper and soak it in resin solids to create a plastic-like surface using thermal fusion. Melamine is much thinner than laminate so it only requires psi to adhere it to the MDF. It typically only has a 5-year lifespan. A tree is peeled creating a very thin sheet. The sheets can be layered to create a stronger thicker material that can be stained and even sanded. Thermofoil is made by heating and molding vinyl to the MDF in a special vacuum press.

Thermofoil is prone to delaminating and peeling around the edges of cabinet doors. Before you can paint mobile home cabinets you need to have a healthy surface.

Unfortunately, MDF with laminated and paper coatings are prone to peeling and crumbling. Older MDF cabinets often have large pieces missing. The images below show the most common kinds of damage suffered by MDF mobile home cabinets: simple laminate or paper separation and actual damage of the MDF such as crumbling or missing edges. The paper wrap tends to peel or curl around the edges. To remove the paper, use an Exacto knife to carefully cut away the loose paper without cutting into the MDF.

Cutting in a square or rectangle shape will make it easier to glue a matching piece of paper in the area you just cut away. A good place to start is the scrapbooking section of Etsy , your local craft and paper store, or Amazon.

To adhere a new piece of matching paper most pros recommend contact cement, just follow their directions. For cabinet doors that just have damage on flat edges, you can add a new veneer edging. Just click here to learn how. For small areas, you may just need to use a cabinet touch up kit. Paint in the base color first and create darker wood grain lines.

In a case where you have a lot of bare MDF , you may be able to sand the paper down to create a smooth feathered edge without damaging the remaining paper wrap further and then use a self-leveling bonding primer to create a smooth surface for paint. The second option would be removing the rest of the paper from the door and the other doors so they all match so you have a smooth surface to paint. A heat gun works well to melt the adhesive on the paper so you can peel the rest of it away.

Once off, lightly sand and prime before painting instructions below. Home Depot recommends that if your MDF cabinet door has a slight peeling of the laminate or Thermofoil, like the image above, you can glue it down with contact cement or other relevant adhesive.

If your older mobile home cabinets are crumbling around the edges or have extensive structural damage like the image shown above, you have a few options. You can clean the edges up a bit and give it a better shape with a medium grit paper or.

With really old MDF, one swipe with sandpaper is like 3 swipes on regular wood but you still may not get a smooth surface. The most popular products used to repair MDF cabinets are wood filler, epoxy putty, and Bondo yes, the company that makes automotive filler, however, they have a product for homes.

Follow the directions on the epoxy or Bondo. This keeps the MDF from crumbling and gives the epoxy or Bondo something to hold onto. For large areas and corners, you may want to put a few screws into the damaged areas like Facelift Furniture advised. For edges, roll out the epoxy or Bondo so that it reaches end-to-end and will fill in the damage. Press into the screws or nails to fill in the area completely.

Allowing 24 hours for the epoxy or Bondo dry and cure is smart but follow the directions on their packaging. Once dry, prime and paint using the directions below to paint laminate. To use the wood filler to create large missing areas you need to give it something to hold on to which is why you see all those screws in the image above.

Read more about the process at FaceliftFurniture. Check this link out to see more wood filler examples. If you do uses Bondo to repair MDF use an oil based primer and then sand it with a grit paper. Resurfacing mobile home cabinets can be simple or complex, depending on how much time, cost, and effort you want to invest.

If you have a small kitchen, it may be cheaper and easier to just replace the doors instead of trying to repair them. However, the most affordable way to replace mobile home cabinet doors is to make your own. Beneath My Heart has a tutorial that will help you make your own kitchen cabinet doors here. The best tips we can give is to spend money and buy the best supplies you can afford.

Better brushes, primers, and paints cost more because they are made with better ingredients and materials.

Painting professionals always say that preparing the surface is the secret to getting great results when painting anything. The primer and paint must create a true bond to the surface it is applied or it will peel and bubble. The only way to do that is to clean the surface extremely well and then clean it again. TSP is the most recommended cleaning agent for cabinets but a few bloggers say Dawn dishwashing liquid works just as well.

For shiny laminate or melamine skin over your MDF you may want to lightly sand it to give the primer better gripping power. If your cabinets are especially shiny you can also use a liquid sander to degloss the surface. Only sand with very fine sandpaper if it will help you achieve a smoother surface.

Be sure to clean the surface again after sanding and use a tack cloth. MobileHomeFarmHouse had great results after painting their mobile home cabinets and they shared their process:.

We applied two coats of this. Then we used BEHR paint and primer in one premium plus. We used two coats of that also. This formula was recommended to us by the man at the paint counter at Home Depot.

I think I had around The colors do not look the same after going over the primer! Priming MDF cabinets is important. A self-leveling oil-based primer is good for cabinets that have small inconsistencies or denting.

Click here for help choosing the best primer. Sanding between two coats of primer is industry standard. The sanding is done with a very fine sandpaper. Not nearly as porous as its wooden lookalike, this type of surface requires unique preparation, paint, and paint application. Follow these best practices to reinvigorate your laminate cabinetry with a fresh face that lasts!

If laminate is cracked, warped, or peeling, that damage can interfere with the bonding of paint to the cabinet. Ensure that the laminate is in good condition by repairing minor laminate damage or re-facing cabinets before applying paint.

Remove knobs, pulls, and other visible cabinet hardware before painting laminate cabinets for smooth paint application without obstructions.

It may be tempting to eyeball your cabinets and decide that any dirt is minimal enough to conceal with a paint job, but your dirty secret will get out when the color fails to adhere well to the laminate. Before you start painting laminate cabinets, gently wipe away settled-on grime and grease using trisodium phosphate. Then, rinse with fresh water and dry the cabinets completely. For better coverage of a large surface area, consider upgrading to a motorized orbital sander.

Your upper body will thank you. Thoroughly scuff the surfaces of the cabinet with grit sandpaper—enough to get a dusting, but not so much that you tear through the paper-thin laminate surface—and clean up any dusty remains with a handheld vacuum and a damp cloth.