What to Do to the Inside of Oak Cabinets When I Paint Them Black?

The Process

• Painting kitchen cabinets is a fair bit of work, especially if you are painting the insides as well. Preparation is critical to success. After removing all the doors, drawers and hardware, sand every inch of the cabinets and clean them with a strong degreasing detergent or deglossing liquid. A professional tip: combine these steps by using a sanding sponge or wet-dry sandpaper with the detergent instead of a sponge. Once rinsed and dried, they are ready to prime and paint.

  Do the insides of the cabinets first. Not only will you be able to get most of your stuff off the floor and dining room table back into the cabinets faster, it's much easier to do it this way because you won't have to worry about banging into freshly painted interior surfaces while reaching inside to paint.

Choices

• Painting the insides of the cabinets with latex paint will pose a problem. Although latex paint dries quickly to the touch, it will take up to a month to cure to full hardness. This means that anything hard, like stacks of plates or bowls, is likely to stick to the fresh paint and mar it.

  If you want to paint the insides of the cabinets, you still have several choices. You can paint them with two coats of oil-based paint, using a small foam roller. You'll need to wait at least eight hours between coats and have plenty of ventilation to dissipate the fumes---but once oil-based paint is dry, it's cured and hard.

  Alternatively you can use latex paint for the insides, but leave the shelves unpainted and use adhesive liner paper.

  Choose a paint color that is light and clean, perhaps echoing a color in your counter tops or kitchen walls. There's no rule that you need to paint the insides all the same color. You can paint one shade on the lower cabinets, perhaps matching the floor, and another in the upper cabinets.

  Another fast-drying alternative is a wiping gel stain. These brush on and wipe off like regular stain but will adhere to glossy surfaces. Consider a black or deep brown stain, which will allow the oak color and grain to show through but eliminate the raw look of light oak. Similarly, a white wiping stain will give you a whitewashed effect.

  Your easiest alternative (apart from doing nothing at all) is to simply leave the insides of the cabinets unpainted wood, but find an attractive adhesive shelf liner for the shelves and bottoms of the drawers.