Avoiding Paint Splatters and Other Disasters in Your Kitchen

Painting kitchens means I’m working in someone’s home. Even if I’ve been able to apply the undercoat and first coats in my workshop, the final coat needs to be done after the kitchen has been installed in its final location.

Working in someone else’s house brings with it a lot of care. Quite often, the kitchen floor will be new. The last thing I want to do is leave behind paint drops on a freshly laid tile or wooden floor. Or an existing one, for that matter. And I’ve done extensive research among my customers: they feel the same way.

So I put a lot of time into preparing the location and protecting the floor around the units I’ll be painting. I think this is vital. You do see an awful lot of painters setting to work without so much as a drip cloth. For me, that’s like watching a horror movie. You don’t know when, but you know a drop is going to drip on to the floor at some point. The tension is a killer.

Paper floor protection taped into place

Protecting your kitchen

I get rid of that stress by taping down a layer of very thick paper on the floor around the units. If a rebel drop escapes my brush, it’s not going to cause a problem.

Not only that, by laying down the paper, flush with the units, I’m making sure that when I paint the bottom of the units, no paint can get on to the floor as I draw my brush along the very base.

I use paper for a number of reasons. First, paper is easy to keep dust-free. And dust is the absolute enemy of the kitchen painter—any painter. A drip cloth is harder to clean. It can also be much harder to see dust on it. It’s very easy to see dust and clean it from a flat layer of light paper. Paper also doesn’t hold dust the way a cloth does. Cloths are basically dust enablers, providing dust with a great place to accumulate and plot against you.

Also, I can lay as much paper as I need, rather than moving a drip cloth along as I go. Once I’ve laid the paper, no part of the kitchen is ever unprotected while I’m working. It stays down until the job is done. That’s the way it should be, I think.

Taking the time to prepare a kitchen before I start painting gives peace of mind to both me and (more importantly) my clients.