Refinishing kitchen cabinets costs a fraction of replacing them, and on the solid-wood boxes in most Triad homes there is usually nothing wrong with the cabinet except its colour. What matters is that cabinets are not walls: they get touched, wiped, splashed and knocked every day, and a finish that would be perfectly adequate on a hallway will be chipped along the door edges within a year.
Why cabinets fail when they are done badly
Three reasons, and they are all preparation. Kitchen cabinet doors carry years of cooking grease, and nothing bonds to grease. Factory finishes are hard, slick conversion varnishes or catalysed lacquers that paint will not grip unless the surface is properly abraded or a bonding primer is used. And the edges and rails take all the wear, so any weakness in adhesion shows up there first.
So: doors and drawer fronts come off and are labelled. Hardware comes off. Everything is degreased, then sanded, then primed with a bonding primer chosen for the existing finish. Grain is filled where you want a smooth painted look rather than open oak grain showing through.
The finish
We spray the doors and fronts rather than brushing them, because a sprayed and properly levelled finish is the difference between a cabinet that looks refinished and one that looks painted. Boxes and face frames are done in place with the kitchen masked off. Between coats everything is sanded again.
Then it has to cure. Cabinet coatings reach handling hardness in days and full hardness in weeks, and the most common way a good cabinet job gets damaged is by being loaded and slammed on day two. We will tell you how long to go easy on it.
Containment
A kitchen is in the middle of a house and the dust from sanding cabinets will travel through all of it if nobody stops it. Rooms get sealed off, HVAC returns get covered, floors and counters get protected.
What we will tell you honestly
Thermofoil doors that are already peeling will not refinish successfully — the film lifts and no coating fixes that. Badly water-damaged boxes under a sink are a repair before they are a paint job. And if what you actually want is a different door style rather than a different colour, refinishing is not the answer and we will say so.
Laila SC hired us for cabinet painting and we ended up doing her front door at the same time, which is a fairly typical way these jobs go — once the sprayer is set up and the colour is agreed, the extras are cheap.
