Cabinet Refinishing

A Small Kitchen Is Twenty Something Openings, Not a Room

Cabinet work is not priced or planned the way wall painting is. Nobody cares how many square feet of kitchen you have. What matters is the count of doors and drawer fronts, because each one is a separate object that has to be removed, cleaned, filled, primed, sanded, sprayed three times, cured and rehung. A typical Santa Monica galley or single wall kitchen comes in between eighteen and thirty openings. That number, plus what the faces are made of, is most of your quote.

The first thing we do on site is open a door and look at the back of it and at the edge of the stile. Solid wood, a veneered panel in a wood frame, a laminate face, or thermofoil wrapped over particle board. Those four take four different primers and they have four different failure modes. Getting that wrong is how a beautiful looking kitchen starts peeling at the corners in month four.

Removal, Labeling and the Door Map

Doors come off first. Each one gets a number written on masking tape on its back edge, its hinges and screws go into a bag taped to it, and the number goes onto a hand drawn map of the kitchen. Shelf pins and bumpers go in the same bag. This sounds like fuss until reassembly day, when nine lower doors that look identical are in fact nine doors with nine slightly different hinge cup positions worn into them.

In a tight kitchen we often split the job. Uppers leave on Monday, lowers leave on Tuesday, so you spend the week with somewhere to put things rather than with every cupboard open at once. It costs us an extra trip and it is worth it in an occupied home.

Cleaning, Which Is the Part That Decides Everything

Kitchen faces carry cooking oil. It is heaviest around the pulls and above the range, and it is invisible. Sanding an oily door does not remove the oil, it grinds it into the scratch pattern and guarantees a bond failure exactly where hands touch. So every face is washed with a degreaser, rinsed with clean water and dried before an abrasive goes anywhere near it.

Then the surface is abraded, not stripped. We are looking for a uniform dulled surface for the primer to key into, and we are being careful on veneer, where an aggressive pass goes straight through a paper thin layer and into the substrate.

Filling, Priming and Building the Finish

Open grain oak needs a decision. Left alone it reads as painted oak, with the grain telegraphing through, which some people like. Filled and sanded twice it reads as a smooth modern door. That choice changes the price and we make it with you in front of a sample rather than assuming.

Chipped edges, blown out hinge screw holes and split rails get repaired now. Then the primer, chosen for the substrate: shellac based where old stain or knots will bleed, waterborne bonding primer over sound factory varnish, a specialty adhesion primer on laminate and foil. Primer is sanded flat, and that sanding is where the smooth hand feel of a good cabinet job comes from.

Faces are sprayed flat on racks away from your home, three thin coats, denibbed between them, in a waterborne alkyd or a two component urethane depending on how hard the kitchen gets used. Boxes, face frames and interiors are brushed and rolled in place behind zippered containment, because on a face frame that is the better finish and it keeps atomized coating out of your rooms entirely.

Reassembly and the Cure Clock

Doors go back on when the finish is ready. Hinges are adjusted so the gaps are even across the run, bumpers are replaced, and the numbered bags make the whole thing a reading exercise. Then we tell you the truth about cure: the enamel is handleable in days and genuinely hard in weeks, so stack plates against a lower door later than you want to.

Call (424) 673-5861 for a door count and a written scope.