I’ve had my trusty Kitchen Aid for almost ten years now and it’s served me very well, but I have regretted my colour choice of very retro red. It’s cute but not really my style at all.
It’s not the first time I’ve toyed with the idea of painting it a different colour but I’ve always left it at that. A few days ago I started thinking about it again and this time actually found a few Youtube videos and blog posts about people painting their Kitchen Aids with spray paints meant for cars, and with good results. I brought it up to my man and he said it could be done and asked what colour I wanted.
I wanted something neutral I knew would go well with the kitchen now and going forward, maybe a creamy white type of shade. I actually let my man shop all on his own and he found me a colour I’d call light linen, I could have not picked a better one myself, it’s a very beautiful muted and light shade.
As we are a pair of nocturnal animals, we started on the repainting task late one evening. We took apart what could be easily put back also and started to lightly buff off the old gloss with 400 grit sanding paper.
Sanding was the easy part and then I was left with the task of masking anything that I didn’t want paint on. I think it took me at least an hour of wrestling with the tape before I was happy enough with it. I left out pretty much all the screws because I thought they might even look better painted on, and it would have been really hard to mask just the screws and not have any red showing afterwards.
Since I have zero experience with spray painting, I let my man do the honours. We soon found out that it might have been smart to do a bit more prep work on the space we used for painting, the conditions were anything but hermetic. Hello dust and dog hairs!
It took almost a full can of the white primer to cover most of the original red paint. We did several layers, let it dry overnight, assessed the situation, sanded some uneven parts with 2000 grit and added one more layer of the primer. Finally it was time for the actual colour, which I was nervous about but was very pleasantly surprised.
Overall at this stage the project is looking pretty good but I am worried about a few spots. There was a problem I noticed when masking the metal ring that is around the part where the whisk attachement goes, there was oil leaking from the motor. I tried my best to clean it up multiple times and we did the final clean just before putting on the primer. It looks like there might be some oil seeping through the paint in some parts so we’ll see how that goes.
We just put on the clear gloss and now we wait for it to dry properly, remove the tape and hope for the best.
