Should wood flooring be installed before or after kitchen cabinet painting and what steps to take to achieve the best results for clients.
Installing flooring is a messy part of renos so you may want to do all the messy stuff first! Especially before painting, however, we can work around everyone. After 40 years we have learned how to do that well!
Being said,
In most cases painting the cabinets before or after only matters if any flooring butts up against any panel it would damage due to a very tight fit. Otherwise, for that reason only, flooring is usually installed after but we can also work around all trades to make things go smoothly (win-win).
We are extremely fussy wanting everything to look as perfect as possible so one thing you must remember to tell flooring trades.. DO NOT APPLY NON-PAINTABLE SILICON around anything that will be painted!
NOTE: If they apply silicon where we have to paint the cabinets... we will have to scrape it off which isn't fun to do.
Floor layers always use non-paintable silicon to hide gaps around islands and kick plates. They will use a semi-transparent non-paintable product that you can't see unless you are down on your knees. They smear it everywhere including where you wouldn't expect it to be so high up on a cabinet. It's okay that they do that after painting (I suppose) but not before.
You can ask them to come back once it's all done. Good trades understand this and will do that because it's the best way to finish for the client's end result.