Medical test salesman. Internet pioneer. Pilot and a captain in the U.S. Air Force. Kevin Casey has held many jobs in a very varied career.
No matter what the job, Casey says, he takes pride in the level of attention to detail he pays to whatever he is doing. These days, he applies that focus to the business of painting kitchen cabinets. He goes by the name Cabinet Painting Guru.
A native of Smithtown, New York, Casey flew B-52s for the USAF in the 1980s. After his honorable discharge in 1990, he took a job selling screening tests for prostate cancer.
In 1999, he started up a new internet company designed to make photo sharing easier online. The venture was successful, but not the market leader. “We did OK, but we had a pretty complicated system. Moral of the story was, simple is better,” he says.
Still, the business was successful enough that Casey sold it to a competitor in 2012. While figuring out what to do next in his professional life, Casey took the opportunity to freshen up the kitchen cabinets in his daughter’s house in Newtown, Pennsylvania.
“I always wanted to redo a kitchen. I spent 750 hours on it, did a new granite backsplash, heated floor tiles. On the cabinets, it’s part of my DNA that I hate throwing away stuff if it’s still good,” Casey says. “I realized that you can paint them and get a whole new look without spending the money to replace them. That was the brainchild behind starting this.”
His daughter was about to get married at the time. At a pre-wedding party at the house, Casey says, people went up to her and said, “Love your cabinets. Where did you get them?”
Painting was not a totally new experience for him; while he was an ROTC student at the College of the Holy Cross, he had managed his own house-painting business on Long Island.
He went on to paint the kitchen cabinets in his home — then in Bucks County — as well as the cabinets in his parents’ vacation home in Vermont. In each case, neighbors who saw his work asked him if he would consider painting their cabinets.
“I decided this could probably be a cool business,” Casey says. “I had done the corporate thing and the entrepreneur thing, and did well at both of those, but it was fun to do this as well. I like to see the joy on my customers’ faces after I finish a job. So I pulled the throttles on my career and became a cabinet painter.”
Since 2018, Casey has lived in Pennington with his wife, Pam Cornell. He has painted the kitchen cabinets in this home twice — the most recent time, he says, not just to give his wife the color that she wanted, but also to test a new paint that he now says is the best in the world for the job — one that he imports from Italy.
“It’s 162 bucks a gallon,” Casey says. “That’s OK because you’re typically only using one or two gallons on every job. It’s a phenomenal paint. We pour a hardener into it and once we start spraying, we have three hours until it’s unusable. It’s the hardest paint you can spray in the world.”
While Casey say that it is impossible for him to guarantee that a paint will not fail — “It’s really simple: there’s a user involved,” he says — he stands behind his paint.
“I tell people, ‘You’re probably going to move or get tired of the color before it fails,’” he says.
The Cabinet Painting Guru typically books jobs six to eight weeks out. “What I do is, as soon as they reach out to me, I send them a template text, ask for five or six images of their kitchen. I can pretty much get a good idea of what their kitchen looks like from the pictures but if there is an advantage for me to meet (the homeowner) then I will go out to the home.
“Sometimes I will have a relatively lengthy dialogue for them to get to know me, and for me to get to know their project.”
Casey says he believes in the philosophy of “an educated customer is the best customer.” He admits that there are lower cost painters out there, but warns customers that sometimes they get what they pay for.
“Our process is different,” Casey says. “We spend a lot of time on preparation of the cabinets. We clean them, we degrease them, and then we degloss them.”
After that, Casey and his team sand the cabinets and drawers down with 400 grit sandpaper. They use a sander that has a vacuum hose on it to takes the wood dust out of the air before priming.
“We use — let’s just call it a proprietary primer — that locks in any of the tannins or oils from the wood. That’s an important step,” Casey says.
All woods have tannins, Casey says, and all tannins leech out — some a little, and some a lot.
“Our primer was developed to block out pine knots and it’s very effective in turning dark into white. It creates a barrier and a shield. If you don’t use that, you can get pink streaks in the paint. And those can appear during finish process, a month later, or a year later,” he says. “It’s really just the oils mixing with the inferior primers. That’s unfortunate, because you then have to take all that paint off that cabinet and redo it.
“I try, and I’m successful most of the time in really describing what makes our process different. But I still get at least one call a month from someone who chose a lower cost painter, and their paint is sliding off or flaking off and they can’t reach the guy.”
While the Cabinet Painting Guru does not do whole cabinet replacement, Casey will work with customers to reface their cabinets — usually with wood, occasionally with laminates.
“Thirty percent of our business is re-dooring and re-drawering,” Casey says. “If someone says they want to change the style in their kitchen, I have a supplier in the Amish Country who has been making cabinet doors and drawers for 50-plus years. Most people in the last three years have gone with Shaker style. Sometimes they have laminate cabinets that are not in good shape, and if that’s the case we will try to replace them.”
Casey says that lately, 95 percent of his jobs have involved painting cabinets some shade of white. “Whites are divided into warm whites, with brown in them, or cool whites, with gray in them,” he says. “There are five to ten really common whites that we use. The other 5 percent are super-light grays, because the kitchen has some coolness in it.”
He says that he has had some customers ask for one color for higher cabinets, and another for the lower ones, but that it is not that common. More common is for customers to ask to paint the cabinets in one color and the kitchen island in another, usually darker, color.
That’s the color part of it. The other part is the style of the cabinets. While Casey says there are between 50 and 75 styles of cabinet that he offers, almost everyone in the past three years has chosen a Shaker style. The Cabinet Painting Guru also offers the services of a professional kitchen designer.
Ten years into his new career, Casey is still enjoying it. The hardest part, he says, is probably finding painters to work with him who have the same attention to detail that he has.
He does not let that attention to detail impact the amount of time a job takes to complete, however, saying many jobs can be completed in under a week.
The thrill of seeing a kitchen transformed by a new coat of paint never gets old, though, and Casey seems to enjoy it as much as his customers do.
“I’m still amazed to this day how good the cabinets look and how quick and easy it is to do,” he says.
Cabinet Painting Guru. Phone 215-982-0131. Web: cabinetpaintingguru.com.
