How a Finish Is Applied Matters as Much as What's in the Can
Updated: 1 day ago
Wednesday's post laid out what a trained finisher actually works with: a rag for wiping stains and oils into the wood by hand, brushes — natural bristle for oil-based finishes, synthetic for water-based — a pad for French polishing shellac, and spray guns, plural: HVLP for fine, controlled work, conventional air spray from a pressure pot, air-assisted airless when production speed matters, airless when volume matters more than finesse. Plus the colour tools: pigment stains wiped into open grain, dye stains sprayed on to set a base colour, toners sprayed over a sealed coat to even colour out, glazes wiped into mouldings and grain between coats, wash coats to tame blotch-prone woods before the stain ever goes on.
That list is worth repeating here, because it's the lead-in to this post. The reason we do what we do is experience, and the tools are a big part of that training. Eighteen years and 945 kitchens don't just teach you which product to buy — they teach you which tool the piece in front of you calls for, and why: when a rag beats a gun, when a dye stain sets the colour better than a pigment, when a toner evens out what a stain can't.
This post picks up where that list leaves off: how the finish goes on — flat or hanging, hand or spray, solvent or waterborne.
Every coating brand recommends its own system. That's their job. It doesn't mean their system is the best in the real world — it means it's the best for them to sell. A finish is a system, and the system is only half the story. The other half is how it goes on: flat or hanging, by hand or by spray, solvent or waterborne. Get the application wrong and the best product in the world won't save it. Get it right and the finish holds up for years. Here's what that looks like in practice — and what the brands themselves say about it.
We're giving away the method here, not just the results — flat doors, hand-worked boxes, shellac over oil, infrared cure. If you start hearing the same things from other companies down the road, you'll know where they read it first.
Flat versus hanging
Doors come off and go to the shop, where they're sprayed lying flat. Flat buys two things: a heavier coat per pass, and a surface that levels out instead of running. Hang a door from a clip and gravity works against you the whole time — the finish flows toward the bottom before it sets, and the bottom edge goes on heavier than the top whether you want it or not.
There's a second cost to uneven thickness. Wood expands and contracts in a home as the humidity changes through the seasons, and the finish has to move with it. Where the film is thin, it wears through first. Where it's thick, it's stiffer, so it's more likely to crack when the wood moves underneath it. Uneven thickness gives you both problems at once — and it's another reason the doors are sprayed flat, where the thickness stays even.
Wood movement deserves its own mention, because it decides where a finish fails. Different woods move different amounts — and in our experience, the harder the wood, the more it can move. A bare maple stile or rail, two and a quarter inches wide, can move up to an eighth of an inch when the bare wood gets in front of water. With a finish on it, it won't swing that far — the finish slows the moisture moving in and out — but the movement is still there, working under the film. That's why the coating over top has to be even, with proper wrap-around on the edges. Thin or missed edges are where the movement turns into a crack. There's more to come on the various wood types and how much each one moves.
Cabinet boxes don't need to come off. They're vertical, in the home, and that's where the application changes.
Hand versus spray
Spraying is fast and even — that's why doors are sprayed. But spraying in a home means overspray, masking, and a gun that can't reach into every profile. On a vertical box, primer worked in by hand goes where it needs to go: into the grain, into the corners, into the end grain. It's slower. It's also the reason the primer grips. This happens in any wood with a deeper grain pattern, but it's most prevalent in oak because of the wide pattern. Oak grain can run deep, and a sprayed coat on a vertical side panel crawls away from it — the product flows away from the grain instead of into it. Depending on the grain it can look like fish-eyes, but crawling is the real term for a coat that won't flow into the grain. It's a wetting problem — surface tension pulling the coating away — while fish-eyes are usually contamination. Sometimes that leaves the coat bridging across the grain; in most cases the grain just doesn't get filled at all. And a bridged 2K coat is the one that fails later. With hollow voids underneath it and a hard, rigid film on top, the wood's seasonal swelling and shrinking in the home fractures it right along the grain lines. A 1K coat that's worked into the grain has no voids to fail across, and it gives with the wood instead of fighting it. There is one exception: a 2K sprayer can fill the grain first, and then there's nothing left to bridge over. But grain filling is a separate step with its own labour, and it ought to be part of what they tell you they're doing. If it's not in the process they describe, you can't tell whether the grain was filled or just bridged over. The only way spray fills it is a heavy coat, and heavy on a vertical surface runs, so filling oak grain by spray takes multiple coats. Worked in by hand, the primer is forced down into the grain instead of crawling away from it. General Finishes gives the same fix in its own troubleshooting guide: on oak, hand-apply the first coat, then spray. Waterborne finishes tend to crawl on raw grain like this, which is why the primer here is B-I-N, a shellac primer, worked in by hand. It flows into the grain instead of crawling away from it, and once the grain is sealed under primer, the waterborne coats flow over a sealed surface, not raw grain. Spraying has its place — on a flat door in a booth, nothing beats it. In a customer's kitchen, on a vertical box, the hand does what the gun can't — and it doesn't leave brush marks or roller marks behind. Everything levels itself out to the pattern of the material below it.
I know there's always a skeptic. Below are before and after pictures of a black island, downloadable and zoomable — in the after picture, the door and drawer fronts were sprayed, and the flat box exterior was rolled. Do you see any difference?
And because the boxes are mostly done by hand, there's no spray booth to set up in your kitchen. It's also worth mentioning that spraying inside boxes where a microwave goes or behind clear glass doors, spraying creates what's called kickback from the pressure and leaves a rougher finish behind. Even when we do see the need to spray inside your home we always do the final coat inside boxes by hand to avoid the rough finish. When we do spray inside your home we use a combination of spraying & hand work along with a sealed kitchen & a HEPA filtration system that clears and filters the air very fast.
That's also why the in-home work isn't a 2K spray job. A two-part finish gives you a few hours at most to get the next coat on without sanding — and in a home, where humidity, temperature, and the day itself won't sit still, that's a countdown you can lose. Lose it and you're sanding uncured 2K in someone's kitchen, making dust that can still carry unreacted isocyanate. Most 2K sprayers will run a filter system to pull out the overspray, but even then, some of that hazard gets into the house, even in minimal amounts. That matters because isocyanates are sensitizers: breathed in, they irritate the airways and can bring on asthma, sometimes hours after exposure, and repeated exposure can permanently reduce lung function. Once someone is sensitized, even minimal amounts can set it off again. A 1K waterborne gives you up to a day instead, with no pot-life clock and no isocyanate hardener in the home's air. The schedule fits the house, instead of the house having to fit the schedule.
Both ways get better adhesion — flat doors and hand-worked boxes, each matched to the surface they're on.
Solvent versus waterborne
The old solvent lacquers flashed off fast. The solvent left the film in minutes, and each coat melted into the last — that's what finishers mean by "bite." One film, not layers stacked on each other. The catalysed finishes most shops use today are different: they harden by a chemical reaction, so that melting-together only partly happens, and only for a while. Miss the window and you're sanding between coats.
Waterborne finishes stick — they're known for it — but their solvents don't bite. The solvent in a waterborne finish is mostly water, and water can't soften a cured coat the way lacquer thinner does. So a waterborne coat grips by stickiness and by the sanding tooth between coats, not by melting into the last one. That's why the company work sheets insist on sanding between coats — with one exception that's standard practice across the industry. The coat underneath the final coat doesn't get sanded — unless there's an imperfection to fix. A nib or a dust speck gets a very light sanding, because that's what sanding is for. But if the coat looks good and there are no nibs, the final coat just goes on. Sanding scratches show through a clear or high-gloss topcoat as haze, and a sanded coat can't give you a glass-like finish. Instead the final coat goes on inside the recoat window, while the coat beneath it is still fresh enough to bond without tooth. At Spray It Like New, that's an hour and a half between the two coats — then the cure. That's the crucial timing: inside the window, the two coats fuse and no sanding is needed. Leave it a day (24+ hours) or two and the window is gone — the coat has hardened too far to fuse, and then you do have to sand. Waterborne finishes dry by water leaving the film, so humidity, temperature and airflow decide the schedule — not the clock on the wall. One product gives you 30 minutes before you recoat, another gives you 3 hours, and full cure can run days to weeks depending on the product. That's not a flaw. It's the chemistry. It just means the finisher has to work inside the product's limits, not around them.
What the brands say about going over old oil finishes
This point is very important where painting over an old finish is required and here's where it gets interesting. Ask the brands what to do over an old oil-based finish, and every one of them answers the same way: stay inside our system.
The majority of kitchens built more than 15 years ago with a clear coat do indeed have an oil-based lacquer on them. So this isn't an edge case — for most older kitchens, going over oil is the whole job.
Renner warns, in their own catalogue, that putting a waterborne topcoat over a solvent-based base coat is "often critical with reference to adhesion" and "generally strongly not recommended." Envirolak sells a bonding primer made for exactly that problem — a primer that sticks to old finishes, solvent or water-based. Gemini's sheet for the EVO topcoat says to stay inside their system — bring in another maker's products and you're outside what they'll stand behind. That's worth being precise about, because "don't mix" can mean two things. Wet, you never blend two makers' coatings in the can. Dry, it's another story: one maker's cured coat under another maker's topcoat is everyday practice when the chemistry is compatible. Sherwin-Williams ties its KCMA claims to the full Gallery system, applied properly.
They're all saying the same thing in different words: use our products, start to finish. And not one of them mentions the product that solves the problem best: shellac primer.
Shellac is the exception the brands don't talk about. It dries by its alcohol flashing off — nothing left to react. Once dry, it won't dissolve in water, and it won't dissolve in oil solvents either. So anything goes over it: oil or water-based, it doesn't matter. It grips a cured oil finish and seals it at the same time — knots, tannin, stains, smells, all locked underneath. That's not a theory. It's the primer under 945 kitchens, and it's why an old oil finish doesn't have to be stripped before it can be refinished.
The cure nobody advertises
Then there's the cure — the step nobody puts in the ad. A conventional two-part finish needs 24 hours to 7 days to fully cure. The brands' own sheets say infrared speeds things up: Gemini's EVO sheet says infrared lighting for cure "will significantly decrease dry times," and Envirolak recommends an infrared cure outright.
Some companies' own care advice tells customers to be gentle for the first few weeks while the finish cures. Our shop doors don't need that waiting period — the colour coat and the clear each get their 20-minute InfraKure cure before the doors ever leave the shop.
What about spindles?
Somebody always asks about spraying spindles — chairs and turned pieces were sprayed vertical for generations, so why all this talk about flat? Because the old solvent lacquers flashed off in minutes, before gravity could bead them on a curve, and each coat melted into the last one. Waterborne is heavier and slower to dry, so it sags more on a curve, and a spindle is hard to sand evenly between coats. The old finishers knew this: turntable, fast passes, the whole chair done in about a minute. Technique did half the work then, and it still does now.
Either they don't understand it, or they aren't upfront about it
Look at the ads and you'll see what we mean. They sell fragments: a day count, a "factory finish" label, a test badge, a named primer, a heated trailer. What they don't sell is the chain — because the chain is the hard part, and you can only advertise the links you actually have.
You rarely see an ad that says how the doors are sprayed — flat or hanging. You rarely see one that says how primer goes onto a vertical box. You rarely see one that says anything about the cure — whether the finish is cured before it leaves, or just dry to the touch while the real curing still has days to run. And you won't see one mention the shellac primer that solves the old-oil problem, because the brands' own sheets don't mention it either.
So we believe one of two things is true, and the ads point the same way either way: either cabinet painting companies don't understand the whole package, or they understand it and choose not to say the parts that don't flatter them. Either way, the customer is left to guess. That's why we publish the whole thing — the prep, the primer, the colour, the clear, and the cure — instead of a slogan.
Every method in this industry has its pros and cons, and an honest finisher will admit that. But one factor matters more than the rest, and every method should be judged against it: adhesion. If the primer grips, the finish holds. If it doesn't, nothing that comes after saves it. The primer matters and the method matters, and what comes after can vary — environmental conditions play their part too: temperature, humidity, and what's in the air around the work. That's why we choose the method we do. Through experience, it's the one that gives us the best adhesion: the best primer for the job, applied the way that grips best, in shop conditions we control, so we can avoid dirt, dust, runs, and sags — and the contamination and grease that show up on every cabinet painter's job sooner or later. And because the doors come back to our shop, we have the time to deal with all of that properly, instead of fighting it on site.
Contamination and grease find their way into every cabinet painter's job sooner or later, no matter how careful the prep is. And that's where the coating choice bites twice. A 2K hardens into a rigid, crosslinked film, so a defect in it can't just be worked out — it has to be sanded out, and then the repair coat has to grip a cured, chemical-resistant surface. And because a 2K can't be rolled out smooth, the repair has to be sprayed — which means the containment goes back up, because spraying a 2K puts isocyanate in the air. The kitchen gets masked off again, the spray barrier goes back up, the ventilation and filtration get set up again, all for a repair, after the homeowner thought the job was done and the kitchen was theirs again. A spot repair in a cured film can even show up differently from the coat around it — different sheen, different texture — so the repair can turn into a full panel.
Nobody's ad mentions the repair visit. But it's worth asking any company before you hire them: if a box needs fixing after you've packed up and cleaned up, what does that visit look like? How much of my kitchen gets masked off again, and for how long?
Our answer is simpler, because our system was built for it. A box is hand-finished, so a box repair is hand work — sand the spot, work the repair in by hand, no booth, no respray, no isocyanate, and no kitchen masked off again. And if a door needs correcting, it goes back to the shop, where the booth already is. The customer's kitchen never gets closed up twice.
Put the two side by side. With our method, correcting a box is a hand fix — sand the spot, work it in by hand, and the kitchen stays open. Correcting a door means the door goes back to the shop. With a 2K sprayed on site, correcting anything means sanding a hardened film, mixing a fresh batch with hardener, masking the kitchen off again, and spraying under containment — a second setup for a repair. One method treats a correction as a touch-up. The other treats it as a small job all over again.
The system, in one paragraph
Tracy Sauer is a college trained Cabinet & Furniture Builder & Finisher since 1984. The Spray It Like New system wasn't bought off a shelf. Tracy built it over the last 18 years, starting in furniture restoration — work where a finish is judged up close and every piece is different. Then kitchen by kitchen, 945 of them, refining the prep, the coating system, and the cure until the knowledge, the science, and the experience all lined up.
If you're comparing companies, ask how the finish is applied — flat or hanging, hand or spray — and ask what goes over your old finish. Then look at the process, the pricing, and the warranty.
Get a free quote from us. Call or text us at (519) 401-3161.
The previous post, on the skilled trade: https://www.sprayitlikenew.kitchen/post/kitchen-cabinet-painting-skilled-trade
Sources: Gemini EVO Eclipse technical data sheet (February 2023); Renner Aquaris catalogue for interiors; Envirolak technical data sheets (T9000, Envirocryl 500); Sherwin-Williams Gallery Series product pages; Milesi 2K technical data sheets; General Finishes troubleshooting guide for water-based finishes.
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