Spraying your Kitchen - the process

What makes us different?

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As I’ve explained in the video, some companies will quote for one day for a kitchen respray and cut corners to reduce the time needed to do a quality job, while others will take your doors and drawers away to a workshop and quote 3, 5, maybe even 10 days, at a much higher cost. 

 

There can be disadvantages with either. The former may cut corners with shoddy masking, not removing the doors, and drawers, no priming or sanding, and only one coat of paint. The latter will claim you need half a dozen coats and that they’ll ‘bake’ the sprayed doors in a kiln; all of which is unnecessary with today’s high-tech speciality paints, and can sometimes simply be an excuse to inflate the price.

 

We spray the majority of ‘standard-sized’ kitchens in one day without the disadvantages of the former and with the benefits of the latter (all except the high price, that is!) using the process outlined below.

  • The kitchen floor is covered with canvas or plastic sheeting.
  • All doors and drawers are removed from cabinets and handles are removed. If new handles are being fitted, existing holes are filled and sanded where necessary and new holes drilled.
  • All kitchen cabinet, doors and drawers are thoroughly cleaned using speciality cleaning products. In a high-traffic, heavy-use environment like a kitchen, even in very clean ones there's sometimes a significant amount of grease that's invisible to the naked eye.
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  • All doors and drawers are sanded to give the paint better adhesion. Spraying shows up the slightest blemish, so we have to ensure your doors are glass-smooth before we add a drop of paint. The dust is sucked out with a portable extractor fan so none of it hangs in the air to spoil the finish once we start spraying.
  • A mini spraying-booth is then erected, enabling us to spray the doors in a dust-free environment. Any overspray is sucked out of the kitchen with the extractor fan, ensuring that none hangs in the air to setlle anywhere you don't want it to settle!

WARNING: I can’t imagine even the biggest cowboy NOT cleaning greasy cabinets and doors, although some will try and dump the responsibilty on you and ask that you clean them yourself before they arrive. It is essential that all surfaces to be sprayed are thoroughly de-greased (by somebody); kitchen surfaces can be covered in layers of grease that are invisible to the naked eye; sometimes we have to scrape the grease from the tops of cabionets with a blade before we can even attempt to clean them! However, not all companies will remove the doors and drawers, due to laziness or corner-cutting.

 

These companies will say they can spray the doors perfectly well hanging on their hinges, and while it’s possible to do this, it’s a last resort for us and something we do only if there’s no space to erect a spraying booth. However, the biggest crime is not sanding. Without doing this you just won’t get the flawless finish you want. And sanding with the doors still hanging on the caninets will fill the kitchen with dust and affect the finish. Spraying is very unforgiving; any dust on doors when they are sprayed will stand out like a sore thumb! That’s why we remove the doors and drawers and use a separate sanding booth.

  • Where space allows (a dining area where we can remove the furniture, a spare unfurnished roo, a garage, even the garden if the weather allows it) each door and drawer is hung vertically in a mobile spray booth, enabling us to spray both sides more or less at the same time. This is a significant time-saver compared to how most companies do it (see below).

    Overspray in the booth is sucked out of the room via an extractor fan (see the video to the left).
  • After spraying, each door and drawer is carefully removed and hung on a drying rack.
  • While they dry, the cabinet sides, splash-backs and appropriate wall areas are masked and the cabinets are sprayed.

    The paint will be touch-dry in ten minutes and resprayable within thirty. When painting with a roller you have to wait several hours because you could lift off the first coat when applying the second if it's not 100% dry. But with a modern, HVLP (High Volume, Low Pressure) spray gun that's unnecessary.

    After the cabinets have been sprayed the doors and drawers are placed back in the spray booth one at a time and given their second coat of paint.

WARNING: Companies that take your doors away to a workshop to be sprayed numerous times in a tenperature-controlled booth before being ‘baked’ in a kiln often do this to make the process seem more complex and lengthy than it needs to be. Perhaps in the dim and distant past that might have been necessary, but with today’s high-tech speciality paints, providing the doors are cleaned and sanded, anything over two coats is overkill. It’s a waste of their time and your money!It’s often just to justify a time-consuming, inefficient, unproductive process.

 

Typically they lay each door flat, spray one side and then place it horizontally on a drying rack until it dries, at which point they turn it over, spray the other side and repeat the process. If dust settles on it while it’s drying (a common occurrence in workshops) the doors may need light sanding between coats. You can imagine how long this takes with a dozen (or more) doors and four (or more) coats.

 

But by spraying both sides immediately at the same time and then hanging them to dry vertically in a dust-free drying booth we bring with us, we slash the amount of time it takes so we can complete the entire process in a single day.

  • After the second coat has dried, the doors and drawers are replaced and the handles re-fitted.
  • Appliances are put back in position.
  • All masking materials are removed and the kitchen is thoroughly cleaned.

We believe our process is the most efficient and productive in use. There’s nothing magical to it; other companies could use it, but for some reason they don’t. For some it’s because it’s too much like hard work and doesn’t let them cut corners. For others it takes away the pretence that the process needs to take several days.

 

But it enables us to give you all the benefits of having your kitchen back to normal after (normally) two days and none of the disadvantages. You can’t lose. Call us on 0151 345 6728 any time between 08:00 and midnight to arrange for us to call out and give you a quote, or use our contact form here.

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