John Thomas: changing oak finish kitchen cabinets to a white painted finish

Our Painting Contractor John Thomas

Our Painting Contractor John Thomas serving Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach and all of Orange County, CA

John Thomas
Thomas Painting
714-343-6132
www.johnthomaspainting.com
j.thomas59@verizon.net

John: Good morning, everybody, my name is John Thomas and I’m your painting contractor. Sometimes, you know, you show up at a job site and you’re expecting some things, to have material on site, you’re going to just use white paint. And it turns out there’s no white paint on site, so you’ve got to make adjustments.

Male: Improv.

John: And so I’m improving because my little ASA computer doesn’t like to talk to Mr. Epson. And so we’re going to kind of wing it here, a little bit. I’m making it up as I go. The first thing I wanted to talk about is some things that you guys might not have known that we do. So you have a takeaway so you can tip me. Feel comfortable about, if someone has a particular need and you go, “I’ve got the painting contractor for you.”

Male: Pressure washing

John: Yeah, we do pressure washing, especially when the cats are nearby. So anyway, lots of people have oak kitchens, dark kitchens, and then a carpenter comes over, a cabinet maker or whatever and it’s like, “Wow, that’s a big number, but we can change your kitchen and make them white.” So this lady here, I don’t know if, we’ll just have to see. It’s oak. What we’re going to do is we’re going to take it over and make it white. What I really wanted to point out, the takeaway, is how we get this job done. Okay, go back. This should be up there, and then that would be much easier. I don’t know if you can see. [inaudible 00:02:04]

Male: All the prep.

John: All the prep that goes in to changing a kitchen, but the kicker on this is what do you do with all those cabinet doors and drawer pulls. How do you store that? Do you lay them out in the garage [inaudible 00:02:29]? It’s just everywhere? You’re walking through spraying them. When do you turn them over and all that? What we have is this cool rack, that can hold 50 of these jobbers. Come on guy, come on, there you go. All right. These cabinet doors have the best view of any cabinet doors ever known to man. But we have this rack here. So what you can do is tell somebody, “Hey, it’s no problem. We don’t have to take over your garage and take over your backyard. We’ve got this really neat rack that holds all those.” Is that working? Have I got the right angle? I know it changes. So we have this really neat rack, it’s on wheels. Some guys from Germany made it, so you know it’s really cool. It was $200. It’s the best $200 I spent. So it holds all those cabinet doors.

You spray one side and next day spray them on the other, then it dries. It rolls over there. The whole lady’s kitchen was like right there in a space like that out on her patio. So we can do something like that for somebody. Because that’s the big kicker with kitchens. What are you going to do with all those doors? It’s a pain in the butt. And they’re nice and safe too. You’ve got kids. Kids like to go, “Oh, is that painted?” with their hand. So you sequester this off there. Okay, so that’s one little takeaway that you might not have known about us that we can handle a big kitchen and take care of their cabinet doors.

All right, now, there’s this button and go there. You want to open up. There you go, hello. And then there’s a lot of oak out there in their French doors. So maybe you know someone that has oak French doors and they don’t want to go and buy new white ones because it’s a really lot of money. And what we’re doing when we paint these French doors, I mean it’s not the cheapest thing there is. Old French doors, they want a new look. This is kind of fun, I get to meet everybody. [inaudible 00:05:03]

Male: Show the camera.

John: I’m getting your full attention here, this is good. Hello, YouTube. Okay. So let’s see, go down here. All these things you’ve got to get good at when you’re a painter now, it’s not.

Male: John, I think we should call those “Freedom” doors not “French” doors.

John: I’m missing the joke.

Male: “French” fries “Freedom” fries?

Female: Oui, oui.

John: Okay, so anyway, this is the exterior of that, and that’s like starting the process. You know, we tape them off. [inaudible 00:05:50] Yeah, it’s just this is rare.

Female: Do you do all, oh wow.

John: We use maybe 200-400, you’re using 600-1200.

Male: Yeah, a little bit finer.

John: Yeah.

Male: So John, I take a melamine.

Male: What’s that called, melamine? [inaudible 00:06:09]

John: So anyway, we can handle that kind of thing and it gives a whole new look to the exterior and interior.

Male: Tell me, do you have to sand it first?

Male: So white is the preferred color that people are going to?

John: At the moment, yeah. We can’t wait for it to turn back the other way.

Male: Is anybody going for like a dark wood finish?

John: Oh yeah, the espresso.

Male: Espresso.

John: Especially [inaudible 00:06:47] you know at [inaudible 00:06:50] with holes.

Male: Oh yeah.

Male: Espresso is the new black. [inaudible 00:06:53]

John: We have more pictures. I’m wasting all this.

Female: That’s a lot of windows to clean.

Male: Do you sand them first? [inaudible 00:07:02]

John: I’m liking this interactive stuff.

Female: You’re organized.

Male: You can really connect with audience.

John: How’s my time? [inaudible 00:07:15]

John: How much time? Who’s the time guy?

Male: Three minutes.

John: Three minutes. Okay so we’re going to go away from that. All right.

Female: John, were those all wood?

John: Yeah. We’ll show this one because we’re kind of running a little low on time. Come on. The one takeaway though, is that maybe if you guys want to use this system, since I’m the guinea pig, was the only one who decided to give it a shot. You might want to bring your computer down here and see if it wants to talk to Mr. Epson. Because my Mr. Asa doesn’t like it.

Okay, so we’ve got a customer in downtown Huntington Beach that’s got a wood garage door made out of, what’s it called? MDF, whatever that is. He wants it to kind of look like wood. So we signed up. Anyway, this is this old, faded garage door, old wooden garage door, and we’re going to make it look supposedly like wood. This is just the beat up, old garage door. They want it to look like this wood. So as we get into this thing it turns out that it’s not really.

Male: Nothing is as it seems?

John: Well, you know, most of the paint came off. I don’t want to waste time showing this, but it’s like we had to strip off all this paint. It started sheeting off. Oh look, there’s way more rust. You see, all that paint’s coming off. He wasn’t much into renegotiating price. So we got stuck with that.

Male: We’re doing good for time.

John: It’s like he doesn’t want to hear about more rust. So long story short, we took it to this.

Female: Oh my gosh.

Male: What color was it to start with?

John: It was like a manufactured wood. [inaudible 00:10:24]

Male: That’s great John.

Male: That’s wood?

John: Yeah, that’s wood.

Female: Pretty

Female: Oh that looks good John.

John: We even painted the black dots. You know those little black dots in there.

Male: Genius.

Female: Well, wait a minute. Yeah, I can see them, kind of.

John: It’s fake wood.

Female: It looks nice. Maybe I’ll have you come out to see me sometime.

Male: That’s just paint, John?

John: Yeah it is.

Female: I want to see. I want to see. Don’t forget me.

Female: That looks like real wood.

John: Yeah, you’ve got to make it look like real wood. So anyway, guys.

Male: That’s a faux finish?

John: Yeah, so we can take on cabinet doors, we can store your cabinet doors. We can do your French windows and change it over. What’s the other takeaway? And we can take a garage door and make it look like wood. That’s the cool thing about the business is that you can take things and change them over and they last a long time. And you can save. When you compare prices to prices, new garage door versus just painting it is going to be probably a couple thousand bucks difference in your own pocket. So any questions?

Male: No time.

Sheila: No questions, but since I didn’t see my house on that computer, John just did an awesome job on my house, really. Maybe I’ll be on next time. The family room looks fantastic. He helped me with the color, I’m very, very happy with the outcome of my house.

John: Thank you Shelia, and thank you everybody.