Melamine vs latex for kitchen cabinets?
I am refinishing my kitchen cabinets which are like a pressboard(very old). I have sanded then down, and I am using BIN primer. Home Hardware says I can use a kitchen and bath latex gloss nowadays, and melamine oil is no longer the only option. Anyone have any opinions? he says melamine has been around for so long, that people just automatically use it, but there are good latex out there now.
Thanks!
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Personally i would use a good alkyd base primer. Then topcoat with an alkyd base paint. both are synthetic oil with very fast dry times and with different sheens. I like the alkyd because ,with very little odor, fast dry ,and great durability., you get best of all worlds. Latex is nice and odorless, but will not hold up as well.
put a good primer on them and paint them with oil base paint it will hold up a lot better than any latex. kitchen get alot of moisture and oil latex wont stay in good shape very long oil base will
melamine
Melamine is a little more stain resistant in my experiance, which is good if you are a not so neat cook, have kids, or don’t always get to cleaning as often as you should. Latex however, is supposed to be more oil resistant, which is why it’s used on the interiors of nuclear submarines, and enviroment that is a little hard on most paints.
I also recently refinished my very old pressboard cabinets. I went with Zinsser primer and latex satin, because I don’t like the gloss or semigloss. It took four coats to get a good finish, but I chose a dark color so that was to be expected. I have two kids under 4 and am a very messy cook, so they get dirty and have to be cleaned a lot.
So I’ve had them six months, and the fronts still look great and hold up to washing well. But the edges, where the outside edges of the doors rub together, have not held up and chip and flake. Because they are very old pressboard cabinets, with very old hinges, the doors don’t hang straight and plumb and they’ve been unscrewed and screwed too many times so they can’t be fixed. So if you also have this problem, latex is not the way to go. I only did this because I know I will have to replace these cabinets eventually, and I’m going the cheap route and putting it off as long as I can. But if your doors/hinges are straight and plumb and don’t rub together, and you are not overly abusive with them, latex could work.