Every front comes down, gets degreased, scuffed and primed for whatever it is genuinely made from, then takes a hard sprayed enamel before being rehung. Kitchen cabinet painting alters an entire room and leaves the counters untouched.
Kitchens here fall into a handful of recognisable types, and pricing follows the type rather than a single rate per opening. Birch slab in Riverside, golden oak in Devonshire Heights and factory white shaker in a 2015 LaSalle house are three separate jobs carrying three separate preparation bills. Ranch-era stock gets its own page at brick ranch and raised ranch cabinet painting.
What A Cabinet Painting Quote Names Before A Single Door Moves
A cabinet painting quote opens with numbers: how many doors, how many drawer fronts, how many boxes. Every price on the page hangs off one of those three counts.
Below the counts sit the material we identified, the primer picked to suit it, the enamel family, the sheen, the passes and anything deliberately left out. Interiors are priced on their own line because shelves and box walls roughly double the sprayed area. Crown moulding, glass-front doors, plugging redundant handle holes and supplying hardware each get a line too. Nothing is added to the cabinet painting afterward unless a new written line comes first.
Kitchen Cabinet Painting Runs The Same Order Of Operations Every Time
Nothing in the cabinet painting sequence is optional, and leaving a stage out is exactly why cheap work lets go. Doors, fronts and hinges are taken down, marked and bagged, with a photograph of the run recorded before any of it travels.
Degreasing is next and it is the step that decides everything downstream. Decades of cooking film, and in plenty of Windsor houses decades of nicotine as well, sit in a layer that water-based cleaners slide across, so heavily loaded frames get a solvent degreaser and that appears on the quote. Then comes filling, an even scuff across everything, and the matched primer: shellac where tannin lives, a bonding product over laminate and melamine.
Two or three sprayed coats follow, each scuffed lightly before the next arrives. Fronts take theirs in a filtered booth elsewhere while carcasses take theirs at home behind taped sheeting, which is expanded on under cabinet spray painting.
Most Of A Cabinet Painting Job Leaves The Kitchen Usable
Two working days inside the house is common, three on a bigger kitchen, with the cabinet painting complete inside two weeks of the booth receiving the doors. Saturated shades add time, since a deep navy or charcoal wants a third pass.
Water, cooking and cold storage all stay available from start to finish. Bare shelving does the storing while the fronts are away, and the single awkward day is the one where carcasses get coated.
Dry is not cured. Careful handling suits waterborne alkyd enamel from around day seven, with hardening continuing for some weeks after, whereas two-component polyurethane is hard overnight. A muggy Windsor August slows cabinet painting cure noticeably, which lengthens the careful stretch rather than shortening it.
What Cabinet Painting Costs Here Against Every Alternative
A whole kitchen here commonly runs $2,500 to $4,500. Small kitchens begin near $1,500, while genuinely large or two-tone work passes $6,000. Per door the local band is roughly $130 to $180, which puts a twenty-five door kitchen somewhere around $3,800 before extras.
Hanging new fronts on the carcasses you already own costs more than cabinet painting does, somewhere around $3,000 to $8,000. Bonding primer, needed on laminate and on thermofoil, lifts either figure, and so does filling oak grain. Those bands describe Windsor-Essex, while your kitchen is governed by whatever the written quote says.
Cabinet Painting That Fails Almost Always Fails For A Known Reason
Four things make cabinet painting peel: grease sealed in beneath primer, a skipped sanding stage, a primer that suits some other material, or wall paint put on joinery. Wall paint never gets hard enough for a surface touched a thousand times a year.
Chipping begins where fingers land, at the pulls and across the cutlery drawer, the hardest-worked spots in any room. A thick film gives way sooner than a thin one, which is another argument for spraying cabinet painting instead of brushing it.
A hairline showing at a panel edge in February is the wood, not the coating. Windsor runs humid for weeks in summer and then dries out hard under forced air, and rail-and-stile doors shrink and swell with it.
Fixed Cabinets Get Sprayed In The House Rather Than A Booth
A bookcase built into a wall, a mantel on a chimney breast and a mudroom bench with lockers over it cannot be lifted out, so the cabinet painting comes to them. Doors and removable shelving still travel to the booth.
Containment is what makes on-site work acceptable. Plastic sealed floor to ceiling, floor protection along the whole route, extraction running and the adjoining rooms masked keeps overspray inside the work area.
The result matches the kitchen because the cabinet painting products match the kitchen. Same primer for the substrate, same enamel, same coat count, sprayed the same way, which is described under cabinet spray painting.
Hinges Are Easier To Change While The Doors Are Off
A door that swings open on its own or bangs shut has worn hinges rather than a fitting problem, and no adjustment fixes a hinge with play in the pin. Replacing them during cabinet painting adds very little, because the doors are already down and the screws are already out.
European cup hinges swap for soft-close versions during cabinet painting, since the 35 millimetre cup already exists in the door. That is a quick upgrade on most kitchens built after about 1990.
Older wrap-around and semi-concealed hinges complicate a cabinet painting job. The originals are frequently no longer made in that size, so the choice is a careful hunt for a match or boring the doors for concealed hinges, which is a different job with a different price. Replacement doors make the same decision, as covered under cabinet refinishing and replacement options.
Book A Free Visit And Get The Kitchen Cabinet Painting Written Down
Forty minutes and no fee. Openings get counted, material gets identified, the poorest door gets a proper look, and a written cabinet painting scope and figure stay behind for comparison. Call +1 (226) 286-5378, describe the kitchen here, or browse the work we take on across the city.
Kitchen Cabinet Painting Questions
How long does kitchen cabinet painting take?
Two working days inside the house is common, and three on a bigger kitchen. The doors spend longer away in the booth, so the whole job finishes inside about two weeks. Deep colours like navy or charcoal need a third coat, which adds time.
Can we keep using the kitchen during the work?
Yes. Water, cooking and cold storage stay available from start to finish, and bare shelving holds the dishes while the fronts are away. The one awkward day is when the carcasses get their coats behind taped sheeting, so plan simple meals that day.
Why does some cabinet painting peel?
Four things cause it: grease sealed in beneath primer, a skipped sanding stage, a primer that suits some other material, or wall paint used on joinery. Degreasing, scuffing, a matched primer and hard enamel avoid every one of them.