Can You Paint Cabinets Without Prep in Oakville?
You can. It will look right for a season and begin letting go around the handles within a year, and by then the only fix is to remove it and start again.
What is actually on your cabinets
The surface looks clean. That is the difficulty.
Kitchen cabinets accumulate cooking grease — an airborne film that settles on every surface within reach of a hob and builds up over years. On older kitchens they also carry furniture polish and wax, applied deliberately and repeatedly by owners who were looking after them.
Neither is visible. Both are catastrophic for adhesion, because a coating cannot bond to a surface it is sitting on top of rather than gripping.
Wipe a cabinet door beside a hob with a clean white cloth and a solvent cleaner. What comes off is what any paint applied without that step would have been applied over.
Why TSP does not solve it
This is the specific failure, and it is common because TSP is what the internet recommends.
TSP is trisodium phosphate, and it is water-based. Against ordinary grime it works. Against wax it does nothing at all, because wax is not water-soluble — so the polish stays exactly where it was and the primer goes on over it.
It also does active harm on solid timber: being water-based, it penetrates the fibres, swells them and raises the grain, which means additional sanding to recover a surface that was flat before you started, and risk to thin veneers.
Our own degreaser is a modified solvent-based formulation for exactly this reason. It lifts wax and polish that TSP leaves behind, and it does not put water into the wood.
The sanding is not about roughness
People assume sanding exists to key the surface so paint has something to grip. That is part of it and it is the smaller part.
Sanding removes the top of whatever is there — the degraded surface of the old finish, any contamination the degreaser did not lift, and the raised fibres on any timber that has been damp. It produces a surface that is uniform, so the coating that follows behaves the same everywhere rather than sitting differently on the patch beside the kettle.
Then it happens again between coats. 180 grit after the primer, 240 between the topcoats. That is not about adhesion at all by then — it is about flatness, and it is why a properly done door feels like glass.
The one case where less prep is defensible
Not every surface needs the full treatment, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
A kitchen fitted within the last few years, never polished, and cleaned regularly with ordinary detergent carries far less on it than a twenty-year-old kitchen that has been waxed. The degreasing step is quicker there because there is genuinely less to remove.
What does not change is that the step happens. The difference is how long it takes, not whether it is done — and it is still the thing that decides whether the finish is attached to the door or merely resting on it.
What "no prep" jobs look like at twelve months
They look fine for a season, which is what makes the shortcut tempting.
Failure begins where hands touch most: around the handles, along the bottom rail of wall cabinets, at the edge of the door beside the dishwasher. It presents as chipping rather than peeling at first — small flakes lifting cleanly away, taking a perfect impression of the surface underneath.
That clean release is the diagnosis. A finish that had bonded would tear rather than lift; one that comes away in intact flakes was never attached in the first place.
And the fix is worse than the original job, because the failed coating has to come off before anything can go on. That is the honest arithmetic of skipping preparation: it does not save the cost, it defers it and adds to it.
What proper preparation involves
Preparation is not a step in this job so much as the majority of it, and the page above sets out where those days actually go — the degreasing, the sanding, the containment, and the order the week runs in. Reading the days spent before any colour goes on is the constructive version of everything below, and it explains why a sprayed kitchen is five days on site rather than two.
What poor prep looks like later
Skipped preparation does not announce itself. It shows up months later as chipping and peeling in exactly the places hands touch most, and it is indistinguishable at first from ordinary wear. Knowing how a finish fails when the surface underneath was wrong is how to tell a finish that is failing from one that is merely marked, and what can and cannot be done about each.
Questions
Common questions
- Do I need to prep cabinets before painting?
- Yes, and it is not the optional part — it is most of the job. Adhesion is the whole question, and a finish is only as durable as its grip on what is underneath.
- Can I paint directly over kitchen cabinets with no sanding?
- Products marketed as no-sand primers exist and they perform far better on clean surfaces than on kitchen cabinets. Kitchen cabinets are the specific case they struggle with, because of what is on them rather than how glossy they are.
- Why isn't TSP enough?
- TSP is water-based. It cannot cut wax, so years of furniture polish stay exactly where they are, and it swells solid timber and raises the grain while failing to remove them. We use a modified solvent degreaser instead.
- How many coats of primer do cabinets need?
- One, tinted, sanded at 180 grit before the topcoats go on. More primer does not compensate for a surface that was not cleaned — it just puts a thicker layer on top of the same problem.
Rather have it done properly?
Send wide photographs of each run of cabinet. The written quote comes back inside 24 hours, and the preparation is not a line you can remove from it.
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