After the initial painting of the kitchen I knew that I wanted the cabinets painted but it took a few years before I was blessed to have my mom come to town and help me get that giant project done. To start, we took all the doors off (make sure you tag each one so that you know where they came from!) and we removed all the hardware. There are lots of posts out there that give you step by step instructions on painting you kitchen cabinets. I'm not going to do that here. I will however, tell you that there is a LOT of sanding involved, especially if someone was kind enough to coat your oak cabinets in a high gloss cherry Polyurethane!! Can you see why I hated them so much? You can't see the gloss, but you can sure see how uneven the finish was. The cabinet boxes were the easy part. The hard part was the doors. All those little groves and the two levels made it difficult to sand and to paint. We used plastic sheeting (stapled it to the horrible c