How to Paint Your Kitchen Cabinets with Chalk Paint

If you remember, a few weeks ago I posted our full kitchen makeover reveal – so many of you loved it and I do, too! 🙂 Today I’m showing you how to paint your kitchen cabinets with chalk paint. Chalk paint, you say? Yes! Chalk paint is a FANTASTIC option for painting cabinets since there is barely any prep work involved (that’s right, no sanding and sanding and sanding!), it goes on easily, you only need a couple coats, and it has a beautiful finish!

*I received the paint for this project from the wonderful Country Chic Paint company – check out all of their neat products HERE!*

Let’s take a little look at where we started with our kitchen cabinets, shall we? Helllooooo shiny orangey outdated oak:

The cabinets were in really good condition and luckily were solid wood – they were just ugly. Definitely not our style. So when I got the opportunity to work with Country Chic’s chalk paint I jumped at the chance! Bye bye orange!

If you’re going to paint your kitchen cabinets with chalk paint, here’s what you’re gonna need:

The first thing we did was remove all of the cabinet doors (we left drawers attached because they were too hard to remove) and taped off the counters and the walls that we didn’t want to get any paint on.

Don’t we have a lovely array of junk?? Haha. The great thing about chalk paint is that there really isn’t much prep required. If you were to paint your cabinets with any other sort of paint, you would need to strip any topcoat, hardcore sand your cabinets multiple times, and strip and sand some more. Can anyone say “no, thank you”??

When prepping to paint your kitchen cabinets with chalk paint the process is really quite simple! Follow these easy steps:

1. Clean off your cabinets with a mild cleaner/soap and water and let dry.
2. If desired, lightly sand once with a scrap piece of sandpaper or sanding block (no heavy duty sander required!) This is optional, but since our cabinets were SUPER glossy I figured it would be a good measure to at least lightly sand. I’m talking like a few seconds tops.
3. Paint one coat of Country Chic’s Primer over cabinets, drawers, and fronts.

It’s that simple! All of the prep work took a couple of hours, tops.

We moved all of the cabinet drawers to our garage and primed/painted in there to cut down on mess.

For the color on our cabinets, we used Country Chic’s All-In-One Decor Paint in Pebble Beach. It’s a delicious neutral gray that’s a little on the cooler side. Perfect for our kitchen!

To paint, we used foam brushes to apply the paint in long, sweeping strokes, making sure to push the paint into the decorative grooves on the cabinet fronts.

To make sure each door was painted evenly, once one side was dry, we would flip it over to finish the coat. Paint one side, flip, paint other side, flip back over, paint side, flip, paint other side. Using this paint ‘n’ flip manner, we gave each door one coat of primer, and two coats of chalk paint.

The paint was super easy to apply and gave a really even coverage. It’s best to work in several light coats over one heavy coat for the best result. Once the layers of paint were dry, we gave each door 2 coats of Country Chic’s Tough Coat – the name implies what it is – a super tough and strong top coat! It’s scratch-resistant, dries crystal clear with no yellowing, and dries quickly. We applied both coats with fresh foam brushes, giving a couple of hours of dry time between each coat.

While hubby gave the doors in the garage their makeover, I was working on painting the inside of the kitchen. The same process applies as with the doors – we did 1 coat of primer, 2 coats of chalk paint, and two coats of Tough Coat. It went by much quicker than I expected it to! I just put on some Netflix and painted away 🙂

Once everything was painted and dry, we put the door fronts back in place and stood back to admire our handiwork. The finish of the paint and tough coat is so smooth and professional-looking! It covered over the wood-grain super well and left us with pretty up-to-date kitchen cabinets!

Painting the cabinets with Country Chic was one of the best decisions we made with this house and it took barely any time or hassle at all! As you can see in the photos above, we still had the ugly black tile counters and backsplash, and no hardware on the cabinets. It took us a little bit longer to get our act together to finish off the kitchen, but once we did it blew us away:

I think I can hear a chorus of angels singing ‘Hallelujah’! 😉 Our ‘new’ cabinets really make this space the beautiful and inviting room that it is. We paired some rose gold hardware with the gray Pebble Beach paint and I just love the pop that it gives!

Learning how to paint your kitchen cabinets may seem intimidating at first, but it really was such a breeze! I would definitely recommend chalk paint if you are considering painting your cabinets as it’s so easy to use and provides a great end result.We got the look of a brand new kitchen for just a fraction of the price by choosing to paint our cabinets instead of gut the whole thing. I can’t help just standing in my kitchen and staring at how beautiful it is!

If you want more tips on how to paint your kitchen cabinets with chalk paint, Country Chic has a great tutorial on their website HERE.

And now, just for reminder’s sake before I sign off, here’s a little before and after of what our kitchen looks like. If you want more before and afters or glamor shots of the finished kitchen space, you can check out our reveal post HERE. 🙂

Thanks so much to Country Chic for providing us with the awesome primer, paint, and top coat for this project!

Would you ever consider painting your kitchen cabinets?