There is a way to prevent debris from blowing up on your baseboard when you spray. Clean the debris out from underneath the baseboard so that it cannot land on your trim. Many painters use a vacuum. I use a leaf blower because the vacuum doesn't do a good enough job. Most of the tract home painters spray their trim and you can cut your hand on the baseboard it's so rough...it's like 60 grit sandpaper.

If the paint is coming off and you are taking the primer with it, then the primer has failed to adhere. That's the simple fact. In your situation, the issue is not the topcoat. What he used on top of the primer is irrelevant. When the primer fails, all the layers on top of the primer fail as well. You can paint over lacquer. People do it all the time. But it has to be sanded, cleaned and dust free so that it will adhere.

Why was the builder back 4 times to fix the initial finish on the cabinets? What was wrong with it and why couldn't that be fixed?

WOW! This is crazy...!

Your original cabinets:
* Do you know who the cabinet-maker was?? It's often a separate firm that a builder contracts with to stain, finish, & install them. The builder may OWN this firm however.
* Were the cabs maybe purchased through a lumber-yard, or big-box store??
* If you can find this out, it MAY help in determining what your INITIAL finish was.

It's too bad you had to paint MAPLE cabinets/trim!!!
* Were they solid Maple, or a thin veneer??
* Was original finish a type of glaze, or a sprayed lacquer??
* As Paintguy asked...What was wrong with the original finish???
* As Paintguy also alluded to, the point of failure is what the primer was applied to...AND THE PREP AT THAT POINT, IF any was done.
* IF it was a glossier lacquer, even a top-notch primer will have a very tough time holding!!

Please let us know some more details!
Faron

Our cabinets were made by a local cabinet maker that works for our builder. The cabinets were delivered "raw" to our house and then finished on-site. I do not know what kind of original finish was applied to the natural maple but it was dispensed out of cans(think aerosol).

From the moment we had the final walkthrough on the house, we questioned the finish on the wood. Some areas appeared to have no finish on them but we were told everything had been sprayed with several coats.

Within 6 week of living in the house, the maple cabs and trim were starting to spot...white spots. The painter(different from the cabinet maker) returned to our home and did some sanding and more spraying. That looked OK for another few months but the problem returned again AND again. Eventually all of the window ledges were "white"...no finish left and very raw and damaged looking.

We continued to complain to the builder who then turned the problem over to Sherwin Williams...the product supplier. Sherwin Williams sent a few cabinet doors to a lab and determined the problem was "product failure". A new contractor was sent in, did more sanding, and brushed all of the cabinets and trim with a lacquer product which made me assume the original products were not lacquer.

Once again, it looked better but not great for awhile and then the finish began to disintegrate once again.

At this point, we were so sick of this crap. The builder sent in ANOTHER contractor who supposedly specializes in restoration and we tossed out the idea of getting rid of the maple look and enameling everything. The builder went for it...not sure why...possibly because they truly had no idea what was wrong with our wood. And this new contractor told us it had been a terrible move for the cabinets to be brushed with lacquer.

We then left our house for 2 weeks with no expense reimbursement(road trip for 2 weeks with 4 kids in a camper...that was fun) from the builder for the financial inconvenience but were hopeful we would return to something that looked nice and was durable.

When we walked in the door after vacation, the work really did look nice until we started noticing things upon closer inspection. We have now had a few areas that have peeled down to the maple, the cabinet doors were not adjusted correctly so the interior hinges have put chips in the new enamel, the inside of our childrens' closet doors(bi-fold) doors were barely sprayed and the wood is showing through, the bottom edge of the bottom panels of every six panel interior door was missed with the sprayer, the baseboard is full of debris, AND THE LIST GOES ON. Oh yeah, we were told to pick out the kind of paint we wanted the house walls to be repainted with(necessary due to spraying)...no strings attached. We directed the painter to use Hirshfields Platinum Ceramic Eggshell(with microban technology). He screwed that up somehow and used this Top Scrub junk.

At this point, we are on good terms with the painter and he is telling us he will return to fix anything we want fixed but I'm like...DUDE, we left you the entire stinking house for 2 weeks. Couldn't you get it right the first time?

That is the story.

You poor thing. That's disgraceful. I hope you've taken photos of this whole process and kept good notes, dates, documented conversations. Aside from that, it sounds like you've run into contractors with poor work and ethical standards. Probably, the cabs were not prepared properly from the get-go. And they compounded the error by applying shoddy measures. I can never understand why teams like this want to skimp on the materials. It's a darn shame they give hard working honest painting contractors a bad name. Tell the team that had you leave for two weeks that you stored a hidden camera in the house.

Yeah sorry to hear this, this is what makes the job tough for the good guys out there, that do things the right way, guys like this give us all a bad name! But this one is easy, the cabinets were DEFINATELY not prepped right before priming and I'll bet $1000 he didn't prime anything, probably didn't even scratch sand them, and "remove the finish down to the bare wood", are you kidding, yeah that would happen !!! It's cheaper to get new doors made from MDF and paint them- there's NO WAY he removed all the old finish cause this would NEVER happen if it was bare wood, with a good quality primer and topcoat. And in the future, generally speaking, DON'T TRUST BUILDERS, because most of them are cheap, lazy, just want to get the job done and move on- it's evident in just about every new house and sorry to say but using the builder's referral for a painter ? C'mon, ask friends, family, neighbors, people you trust who have USED a particular painter before. This loser will give the builder a cutback for the job, that's why he referred him- I will never trust a builder unless I know him personally, I've seen way too many of their faults ! Sorry, but another bad painter who didn't do it right !

The painter did talk about using something called WILLABOND(sp?) to prep the doors. Does anyone know anything about this? And the primer used is by Sherwin Williams.