If you’re painting your kitchen cabinets and wondering if you really need primer — yeah, you probably do. Cabinets aren’t like walls. They get touched constantly, scrubbed, splashed with grease, and blasted with steam from the kettle. Paint alone won’t hold up unless it has something to grip onto, and that’s what primer’s for.
If the cabinets are wood — especially raw, stained, or glossy — primer helps block tannins and keeps the paint from peeling. If they’re laminate or melamine, they’re way too slick for paint to stick on its own. That’s when you need a bonding primer, the kind that basically acts like superglue between the surface and your top coat.
The only time you might skip it is if the surface is already dull, super clean, and you’re using a high-end paint with primer built in. Even then, it’s a bit of a shortcut — might be fine short-term, but you’re rolling the dice.
So yeah, primer feels like an annoying extra step, but it’s the thing that keeps your cabinets looking good longer than a TikTok trend. Worth it.
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