I actually built my own cabinets for the remodel and I set out to paint them back around Thanksgiving. What should have been the easiest (or at least simplest) part of the process has been a maddening disaster.

I'm trying to get a nice and smooth paint finish and wanted to spray it instead of brush/roll. Every attempt thus far has been a disaster.

Graco 360 sprayer gave a striped finish and a neverending stream of paint spits. Returned it and switched to an X5...better, but I'm still struggling to get it dialed in. But dialing it in is taking forever because every attempt wastes about a quart of paint, takes an hour of cleanup, and I have to do it outside but the weather just recently got darned cold and it gets dark 20 minutes after I get home during the week, so there is an awful lot of waiting around between trials.

As for the paint, I started with Sherwin-Williams Emerald. It was universally regarded as the premier option for painting cabinets. But whether I sprayed or rolled it on, it never would cure. I've got stuff I painted over a month ago that is still tacky. Credit to S-W, they refunded my money when I showed them what I had. Good thing too, that stuff is $100/gallon.

Then switched to Benjamin-Moore Advance. After the Emerald, this was probably the second most highly recommended paint I'd seen. With it, I got bubbles. Lots and lots of bubbles. I took that can to the B-M store in Blacksburg and they are doing some trials with it to see if it was a bad batch of paint. They gave me something else to try (free of charge!) in the meantime, but those results are mixed too. The panel I applied with a roller had horrible orange peel, and the panel I sprayed had pretty bad fisheyes.

I started this whole mess with the assumption I'd just pay someone to paint them since that was outside my expertise. But the quote I got was $3-4K which kinda made me twitch. I kinda figure being able to spray a professional-looking paint finish was a skill I wanted to have anyway, so now's the time. But egads is this turning into a PITA.