As owner of ShePaintsPhilly, Pickens turned her love of painting into a way to earn a living for herself that can also save you a lot of money -- if you're interested a new look for your kitchen.
Pickens explains, "To replace your cabinets, an average-size kitchen can be anywhere from $10,000-$15,000. We come in to paint them, typically, for an average kitchen for $2500 and $3000. So, it's a pretty significant savings."
Pickens' website features before and after photos of kitchens she has transformed. The process takes about a week.
"The first thing, the most important thing, Prep is everything for a good paint job," she says. "And the first thing you want to do is to make sure that you throroughly de-grease all the surfaces of your kitchen cabinets."
Pickens covers the other kitchen surfaces, degreases and sands the cabinets and then removes the doors, which are painted off-site.
She showed up several doors that were all painted with the same Sherwin Williams shade, but then given different finishes.
Pickens says most customers now are choosing light colors for their kitchens. "Everyone likes really light cabinets and we are seeing a lot of darker glazes along the edge and inside the panel of the doors."
And she's happy to share tips, like lining paint trays with foil, so you can reuse them, raising the doors up on Solo cups, so you can paint the edges, and leaving the hardware inside the cabinets while you work, so you know what goes where.
And while having Pickens repaint your kitchen cabinets will save you thousands, you can save even more doing it yourself. She'll be teaching workshops in May to help you do that. Check back on her Facebook page for more details on those workshops, once she announces them.
