Tacky Kitchen Painting
Painting kitchens takes a lot of grit. I’m not talking about the kind of grit it takes to walk barefoot up Croagh Patrick. Kitchen painting is physically demanding, but I’ll choose it over shoeless mountaineering any day.
No, I’m talking about the kind of grit you find on sandpaper.
Grit describes the roughness of sandpaper, which comes in numerous grades. The finer the sandpaper, the higher the grit number. Very rough grit sandpaper has a low number, like 40. In fact, in Europe, the coarsest grain is rated at 12. Go any lower and you’re basically talking about gravel glued to paper.
The finest sandpaper grade is 2,500. Beyond that, you may as well be sanding with a sheet of photocopier paper.
1,000 grit sandpaper in use for kitchen painting
I typically use three grades of sandpaper when I paint a kitchen.
I start with either 150- or 180-grit sandpaper on my Festool sander. You might think that’s fairly fine. In reality, it’s still quite rough. If you looked at it under a magnifying glass, you’d think you were looking down on the Himalayas. And that’s important. You don’t want the initial sanding to be ultra smooth because the primer needs something to cling to. Imagine trying to paint a mirror. The paint would simply flake off after a while.
Once I’ve got my primer on, I sand the surfaces again. This time by hand (the Festool is too powerful and would take the primer/undercoat clean off) with something in the 320- to 400-grit range. That gives me a very nice surface for the first layer of topcoat paint. You might wonder why the top coat can stick to a smoother surface than the undercoat. It can’t. But it can stick to the undercoat, because the two are designed to work together. Undercoats are literally the foundation of a good paint job.
The big secret of kitchen painting
After sanding, you can’t just put on the paint. The surface will be covered in very fine dust—as if it had been sprinkled with flour. The finer the grit, the finer the resulting dust. And dust is the kitchen painter’s worst nightmare. (Along with any kind of barefoot mountain-related activity obviously.) The Festool sander has an attachment that connects to my Festool vacuum, which is brilliant. It draws away dust as I sand. And I use the vacuum after hand sanding too. But it doesn’t get all the dust off.
Don’t tell anyone, but here is the greatest secret of hand painting kitchens. The tack rag.
You might ask, “What’s a tack rag, Lee?”
I’d answer, “A tack rag is the greatest secret of hand painting kitchens.”
You might say, “That’s hardly helpful, Lee.”
A tack rag is a cloth coated with a special sticky resin. It has one purpose in life: to remove dust. It’s like a dust Terminator. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until the dust is gone.
Seriously, if someone ever drops a tack rag in the Sahara desert, the locals are not going to be pleased.
After the first coat of finish, I move up to 1,000-grit sandpaper, which results in a beautifully smooth surface for the final coat of paint. It’s the combination of this very finely sanded surface and the settling characteristics of Helmi paint that allows me to give you a fabulous unblemished finish to your kitchen.