A Pool Noodle Is The Unexpected Tool You Need When Painting Cabinets

Americans spend over $500 billion on home renovations and repairs every year, according to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies. Among the many tasks beneath that umbrella, painting is one of the more expensive home improvements, particularly when you account for the cost of labor — painting is a huge, often daunting project, so it makes sense to hire extra hands. And while painting something as immutable as your living room walls is enough of a hassle — you have to cover all of the surrounding furniture and appliances, as well as applying tape along the edges of your working area to ensure you don't drip excess color onto other surfaces, and then take at least three passes with a paint roller if you start with a primer — the affair only gets more tedious when you're dealing with cabinet doors that like to swing back and forth, rubbing off your hard work with every touch. If only there was a clever hack involving pool noodles to make this whole process easier, right?

Well, depending on the nature of your project, you may be in luck. It turns out that there is a fun hack you can try for painting your kitchen cabinets. Put away your brushes for a moment, because this project may be best handled by some spray paint and the aforementioned foam pool noodles.

Pool noodles may bring to mind images of crowded public pools and blowing water back-and-forth with your friends, but YouTuber @rvingdogsandwine2027 offers a more inventive way to think about these common toys in a short that they posted in February of 2023. How does it work? The creator first removed each door from their cabinets (yes, you'll have to remove them). Then, they screwed small hooks into their tops, and then hung those doors in a tarped space outside to spray paint them with no one face blocked or touching the ground. Then the hack comes into full effect as these painted doors are moved onto a rollable clothing rack, each hanger being separated by equally cut lengths of a pool noodle that has been split lengthwise to ensure the segments can be slotted onto the rack.

Setting pool noodle lengths between each hanger does more than just keep them broadly separated. The firm material is able to enclose a hanger tightly from both sides, stabilizing it so there's less chances for the cabinet doors to swing in the breeze and ruin their newly spray-painted coatings by knocking together. It's pretty much the exact sort of tool you've dreamed up every time you've painted cabinet doors in the past, and it's quite a surprise to see it realized in such foamy form.

Whether you're looking to paint your house before selling, or just want to shake things up with a new color, this hack is a cleaner, potentially faster way to handle some of the smaller nooks and crannies that may otherwise be hard to hit while your cabinet doors are still on their hinges.