Refinishing Oak, the Way of the Dummy

Unfilled oak grain (left) vs. filled (right)

If your home was built anytime between about 1970 and 2010, chances are pretty good that at least some of the cabinetry is oak, probably with a medium finish. Besides being fairly unattractive, the style is quite dated, so many a would-be DIY redecorator wants to take brush in hand and repaint those suckers. Good on ya, folks! The problem, of course, is that painting oak isn't as simple as painting pine, so who you gonna ask? the internet, of course! With luck, you won't run into Matt Smolsky trying to explain the procedure at TheBump.com (a Leaf Group site, formerly Demand Media) in "The Best Way to Paint Oak Cabinets."¹

As befits a one-time professional journalist (who now wastes time in direct marketing), Smolsky found some quality resources and skillfully reworded their advice. In that, he's done a far superior job in comparison to most of the young, unemployed J-school grads who once infested eHow. Yet something does not ring true... perhaps because this is something Matt's never tried himself. Well, some of the folks here at the Antisocial Network have painted oak cabinets, and Smolsky missed some crucial points.

The OQ asked about oak, and there's a reason why. Oak, unlike pine, poplar or maple (common wood species used for cabinets) has an open grain. If you don't do something to hide that grain, it will remain obvious that you've just painted over an oak finish. This is especially true of cheap cabinets with oak veneer plywood on large faces, e.g., doors, where the streaks of porous grain can be half an inch or more wide. Smolsky repeats the advice of This Old House and other sites to use (at least) two coats of paint. Sadly, neither of his references mentions that this is insufficient for oak and other open-grain woods: "Slow-drying, oil-based primers work fine on tight-grained woods like maple or cherry, or on man-made materials. But they just sink into open-grained woods such as oak, ash, mahogany, or hickory. Brushing putty, the pudding-thick, oil-based coating [we] used on these oak cabinets, fills the grain as it primes the wood."

Got that, Bump readers? you have to fill the grain before you prime! Even if you were to follow Smolsky's directions, which are fairly good, your oak cabinets would still look like crap when you were done!
For holding forth on a topic about which he apparently knew nothing, Smolsky is picking up a free copy of our Dumbass of the Day award. Perhaps next time he'll ask himself, "Why is this person asking about oak cabinets? Is there something different...?" Or maybe not.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   living.thebump.com/way-paint-oak-cabinets-9800.html

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