Kitchen painting time... ick

If you've ever been in my kitchen, you know it's a 1956, totally knotty pine-covered situation. Cabinets (which, by the way, are solid wood! Well constructed, but so plain...) and planked walls. Wood EVERYWHERE! Even Dad admitted that the overall orange look of the kitchen wasn't a good thing. I guess that's what varnish does after that many eons. I started out priming one set of cabinets the other night, thinking I could get away with not taking all the hardware off... Wrong.

So last night I started removing cabinet doors and hardware. My plan is to take a set of doors outside under the carport today and prime them all in an assembly line. At least I found a primer that lets me get away with not sanding. I discovered last year that sanding and then priming just makes the old stain bleed right through the new primer... To the tune of 5 coats of primer! Okay, so maybe Kilz 2 primer isn't the miracle that it's touted to be. I switched to Bullseye 1-2-3. (I would have used B-I-N, but they didn't sell it here at Wal-Mart. Maybe if I go to Lowe's for a 5 gallon bucket.... But will I need 5 gallons of high adhesion primer for the kitchen? I dunno.)

My sister has generously offered to come over and help me paint the entire kitchen one afternoon next week. I'm not sure how she thinks that's possible, considering that in her house, it took me, her husband, and her two boys an entire day to paint their living room... Just 2 coats of paint, no priming, and no hole-filling.... Okay, maybe she doesn't understand because she didn't actually help with any of the painting in her own house. Yours truly was the primary painter - I had nearly half of the living room painted before her husband got there, actually. (hoping for some good karma on that...) So you can probably understand why I've already started without her. Her expectations are a bit unrealistic.

What my kitchen requires in order to paint it:

• Moving out the refrigerator
• Moving out the washer
• Moving out the dryer
• Moving out the kitchen table
• Moving out the stoneware rack and baker's rack
• A thorough cleaning with ammonia,
• a thorough rinsing and then drying, of every wooden surface in the room.
• taping off anything I don't want painted
• Filling in old nail holes, scratches, gouges, and someone's growth charts on the door frame with wood filler.
• THEN, two coats of this special primer, with about an hour between coats for drying and setting time.
• THEN, we can paint.

Again, I'm not sure how she thinks that the two of us can accomplish this between 4:00 and 10:00 one day after work next week. Is there something I'm missing here? LOL It sounds to me more like a week's hard labor than an afternoon's light work. Of course, if I were to be brutally honest with her about this, she might never come over.

Update:

I have Dad's power drill and 2 batteries now... be afraid... be VERY AFRAID!!!! LOL (And Dad and my brother both said they'd help me if I asked.... They're sure I'll need help rehanging the cabinet doors. They may be right. I may get the cabinets painted and decide I need all new hardware....)

2nd update:

Darn it! I thought I could speed paint by setting up a work area under the carport and painting all the cabinet doors (for one section) at once - but NOOOOOO. It started raining and the temperature started dropping. It's getting downright cold out there! Now the primer doesn't feel like it's going to dry any time soon and I can't move forward. I think I'm going to go buy some decent drop cloths and turn my living room into a painting room.