Cabinet Painting in Delaware County, Done in a Booth

Refinishing means we sand everything down, prime it and spray a new top coat, either paint or stain. What a lot of companies call cabinet painting is a brush and a roller, and the finish is not in the same league. Refacing means new doors on your existing frames, and the thing people miss there is that the frames still have to be sprayed with the same product and the same number of coats as the new doors or the colors will not match.

No, and this is the single most common reason a cabinet job fails. Wall paints are formulated for walls. They never dry all the way through, so the surface stays very slightly tacky. Anything that touches it bonds to it, and within a few weeks of normal use the paint starts coming off the door edge where your hand goes. The label may say the product is suitable for cabinets. That is advertising, not performance. We use wood coatings made for cabinetry, which cure hard and stay flexible enough to take a knock without chipping.

About two days in your house and three days in our shop, so five to six working days for a typical kitchen. You keep your sink, your counters and your appliances the whole time. What you are without is doors, and only while they cure properly.

Because almost all of the work is preparation. If the surface is cleaned, sanded and primed properly, spraying the top coat is the fast part. If it is not, the job takes just as long anyway because it has to be done twice. When a quote is dramatically shorter, something is being skipped, and it is usually the degreasing or the cure time.

We degrease first, and then we sand regardless. Kitchen cabinets carry years of cooking grease that a rag and a cleaner will not fully lift. You cannot see what is left, but the primer can. Any spot that was missed shows through as soon as the first coat goes on, and then that section has to be stripped back and redone.

It depends on what we are looking at. Greasy, heavily used cabinets get a shellac-based primer, which locks down contamination and, usefully, reveals any area we did not get fully clean while there is still time to fix it. Cleaner or newer cabinets get a wood-coating primer. We avoid oil-based primer entirely: the smell lingers in a house for weeks after we leave, and hand oils break oil primer down over time.

If they are solid wood and the boxes and hinges are sound, refinishing is almost always the better spend. If they are MDF or HDF rather than wood, we will tell you to replace the doors instead. The products and the process we use are expensive, and putting them on a substrate that will not hold them is money you do not get back. The coating is only ever as good as the cabinet under it.

Usually use, not the paint. Kitchens take more abuse than any other room in the house: dogs, kids, things piled on open drawers, corners caught with a hip on the way past. We have gone back to kitchens ten years later that still look great, and back to kitchens a year later that were beaten up. Treat them the way you would treat a new car and they hold up.

Two questions. Ask what products they use and how they prep. Then ask where they spray your doors. A lot of companies spray in a garage or a bare warehouse, and dust and damp air end up in your finish. It needs a proper booth with conditioned air, extraction, and a compressor delivering dry air to the gun. Ask to see video of their actual process, not just finished photos.

The gun is the easy part. Every product has its own needle size, its own pressure, its own type of air and its own amount that has to go on for the coating to bond properly. Five products means five setups. Hand somebody five products and one gun and they will use the same needle for all of them, and you will see it in the finish. That knowledge is most of what you are paying for.

Either. We can match what is on there now or spray whatever color you choose.

Very. We have gone back into kitchens we did ten years earlier to do other work and the cabinets still looked good. The finish is at least as tough as the factory coating that was on them originally, partly because of how it is applied: the right primer, the right number of coats, and the right amount of material each time.

Yes, same process. Vanities in particular take a beating from water and hand oils, so the coating choice matters just as much as it does in a kitchen.

It depends on the number of doors and drawer fronts, the condition they are in, and whether you are painting or staining. We look at the kitchen, tell you honestly whether refinishing is the right call, and put the price in writing before we start.

Always. We walk the kitchen with you and send a clear, detailed proposal at no cost.