Cabinet Painting Questions From Hamilton Homeowners

Cabinet painting uses hard furniture-grade coatings, never wall paint. The two families in normal use are waterborne alkyd enamels, which level well and come in thousands of colours, and two-component polyurethanes, which mix a hardener in and cure much harder and faster. Each is low-VOC, and each gets sprayed rather than brushed. The quote names which one your kitchen is getting.

Intact doors take cabinet painting well, with a waterborne bonding primer built for slick surfaces. Doors where the vinyl skin is already lifting cannot, because paint does not stick a peeling skin back down, so those get stripped to the board or replaced. We check the doors beside the dishwasher and the range first, since that is where thermofoil fails.

Only when they appear on the cabinet painting quote, because interiors are a real cost rather than a small extra. Shelves, side walls and the back of every box more than double the surface area of a kitchen, and adjustable shelves have to come out and be sprayed on both faces. Plenty of people paint the boxes and frames and leave the interiors alone.

Yes, and that is where the best results come from. Doors and drawer fronts go to a filtered booth where dust and temperature are controlled, and that is where a level sprayed film comes from. The boxes and face frames stay where they are and get coated in the house behind sealed plastic, so cabinet painting only ever takes half the kitchen away at a time.

Not the way solvent lacquer used to. The doors get sprayed off the property, so the strongest odour never enters the house at all, and the waterborne products used on the boxes are low-VOC and clear quickly with ventilation running. This matters most in condo buildings, where shared air makes low odour a practical requirement.

It gets replaced and painted with the rest so it disappears. A swollen bottom rail under a leaking sink or a cracked centre panel is a single-door problem, not a whole-kitchen problem, and a replacement door costs a fraction of a new set. Because the whole kitchen is sprayed at once, the new door matches exactly.

By a wide margin. Cabinet painting on a whole kitchen commonly runs $2,500 to $5,500, refacing with new doors and drawer fronts runs $3,000 to $10,000, and replacing the cabinetry starts near $15,000 and goes past $40,000 on a large kitchen. Those are Ontario market ranges and your written quote is the number that applies.

The quote lists the door count, the drawer front count, the number of boxes, the substrate found, the primer, the topcoat family, the sheen, the coats and anything excluded. Interiors, crown moulding, glass-front doors and hardware each appear as their own line. A scope change gets a new written line first.

Most work is booked a few weeks out, and longer through spring and early fall when the calendar fills. Booking earlier also gives the colour decision time to settle, since a sample door needs several days in the kitchen before anyone can judge it properly. Emergency work on a single damaged door can often be fitted in sooner.

Replace them first if they are going, because a new counter usually means scratched frames after the cabinet painting is done. Cabinet painting is the last thing that should happen in a kitchen refresh, after the counter, the backsplash tile and any plumbing work. If the counter is staying, the sample door gets judged against it.

Warm water, a soft cloth and a mild dish soap are all the finish needs. Abrasive pads, powder cleansers and anything with solvent in it will dull or cut a cabinet painting finish, and they do the most damage in the first weeks. Wipe spills off rather than leaving them to sit, especially near the sink and the dishwasher.

Yes, and both are common bookings. An island of six doors is about a day and a half of cabinet painting, and a single vanity is one or two days. Either costs less when added to a kitchen booking, because the travel, setup and masking are already covered by the larger job.