The Best Paint for Cabinets (24 Brands Blind Tested & Reviewed)

Hi everyone, I'm Karen from renovatedfaith.com and today we're going to talk about cabinet

paint

ing. I'm starting to

paint

all my kitchen

cabinets

and have done this project once or twice before in our first house. He was a total newbie. DIY Jeremy and I went to Lowe's, picked out the cheapest paint, and started painting it on our

cabinets

. We didn't know that the cheapest paint is not really the cheapest paint. Many times you can get a paint that is very thin like this. one paint in particular was like painting with skim milk and I ended up applying 13 coats, I'm not kidding, 13 coats of paint on those cabinets and I ended up paying a lot more than if I had gotten a better paint and applied maybe two or three. coats, so I've made cabinets before.

I have made a lot of furniture in the last 10 years. I have learned a lot since then and as I prepare to paint our oak cabinets, I want to know the

best

. product that is not necessarily the most expensive but also affordable and will give me the smoothest, most durable finish on our cabinets while saving me a ton of money. So you know me, I'm going to analyze this in depth to find out which one is the

best

. cabinet paint I did several different tests and since I don't completely trust myself because we all have our favorites I decided to put each one in little containers and label them so it's a

blind

test so while I was doing it I didn't know what products I was testing really for the first test.

I tried the coverage. Probably one of the most important aspects of a good paint is how well it covers per coat, so I applied two coats of paint over this black line and the paints that showed the black line. at least after two coats it had the best coverage. I also used this test to test the smoothness with a brush and did the same coverage test again to check how the paint spread, so I could test the smoothness not only with a brush but also with a roller after painting 24 different swatches on the boards, I let the paint dry for a full 30 days so it could cure and reach maximum hardness, then I rated the paints for their coverage and smoothness with both the brush and the roller, I also

tested

each paint to see which one levels out best, in In other words, which ones will level smoothly on an uneven surface and the uneven surface I'm using is the back of one of my oatmeal cabinets that has a very open rough grain.

I also took advantage of this opportunity. to test the sustainability of different paints with ketchup, coffee and mascara and you can see the full results of the stain test in the blog post. However, the most telling test was the one where I put on waterproof mascara for this test. I'm testing the scrubability and by that I mean I want to be able to remove all the mascara without removing some of the paint and you'll see later in the test. I actually used a black wipe to see if it cleaned any of the white paint and the results.

Really varied and it was really eye-opening to see which paint scrubbed best. Last time I

tested

each paint to see which ones held up best when a cold glass was left on them for 48 hours, so I did all the tests after waiting 30 days for all of them. The paints were fully cured or hardened for the truest results to their harshest forms and after looking at all the results I found that Benjamin Moore Advanced was the number one paint, not only does it have an incredibly smooth finish with both rollers. and a brush, but it's inexpensive, costing about 53 cents an ounce.

You can get it locally in almost unlimited colors. If you want the Sherwin William color, just go to your local Benjamin Moore store and they have that color code on his computer. It is a really good Product, with low VOC levels. I was very impressed. The only negative is that it has a longer drying time than some of its competitors. The second, the runner-up, was a product you may not have heard of before. It's called inspired by you and it's this one. from a company that uses premium Italian cabinet liners and makes some of them available for di cables for cabinets and furniture products, so their version is a product called molesssy, but for this we'll call it inspired by you and it was just incredibly soft really durable they did well in the scrub test a little pricey and they only have a certain amount of colors so that's one of the cons but if you want to splurge it was an amazing product and then if you really want You save money on your cabinets, but you also get a really hard finish that is smooth and looks beautiful.

I would choose the Bear Satin Interior Cabinet Polish and not only is it cheap, it's only 30 cents an ounce, but the results were comparable to these two, not as good, but really very close, uh, so close, I'm not sure that you can tell, but it rolled well and brushed well and was also very durable for the scrubability test, so you can't go wrong with any of these products I also included in the blog post the fastest draw option, the best product from sherwin-williams and the best chalk paint or chalk finish paint for your cabinets, if you are interested be sure to check out the blog post at renovatedfaith.com to see the results of the 24 different paints