We unhang every door and drawer front, strip off the grease, scuff and prime it to suit its material, spray on a tough enamel and put it back up. Kitchen cabinet painting recolours the whole room while counters, sink and flooring stay exactly as they are.
Applewood kitchens come in a few clear types. There is the small closed kitchen of a 1950s Applewood Acres bungalow, the oak or maple update from the 1990s in Applewood Heights, and the builder kitchen in a 1980s Rathwood side-split or townhouse. Each type needs different prep, so the price follows the kitchen, not a flat rate.
Plenty of Applewood kitchens have been through one renovation already. A 1950s room may have received oak doors in 1992, or a Rathwood kitchen may have gained a laminate counter and tile backsplash in the 2000s. Cabinet painting works well on these second-generation kitchens because the layout has already been fixed and the boxes are usually newer.
The main thing we look for is how the last update was done. Mixed materials are common, such as oak doors on older painted face frames, and each surface gets its own primer so the cabinet painting finish looks the same across all of them.
We count before we price. Doors, drawer fronts and end panels are tallied first, and each dollar figure on the page is built from that tally.
Under the tally sit the material, the cleaner, the primer, the enamel family, the sheen you chose and how many coats are planned. Cabinet interiors carry a separate price, because shelving and side walls almost double what gets sprayed. Crown trim, glass-front doors, filled holes and new handles are each listed too. Any change to the cabinet painting scope is written down and agreed before the extra work begins.
Cutting corners is what makes cheap cabinet painting flake. Every door, drawer front and hinge comes down, each piece gets a number, and a photo records the layout before anything is carried out to the truck.
Degreasing follows, and nothing matters more. Years of frying leave a film that household cleaners slide over, so we scrub with a strong degreaser and rinse. After that comes filling, sanding every face dull and a primer picked for the surface, such as shellac on oak or bonding primer on melamine.
Two or three sprayed coats of enamel follow, with light sanding between them. The booth handles every door, while the boxes are coated in place inside a plastic enclosure. The booth side is explained on our cabinet spray painting page.
Any kitchen from before 1960 may have lead in its oldest paint layers. That includes a lot of original cabinets in Applewood Acres, where houses went up from 1952 on. We test old painted doors and frames before sanding, and we plan the prep around the result.
When the test is clean, the job runs as normal. When it is not, we switch to contained, low-dust methods or suggest new doors for the worst pieces. The bungalow kitchen cabinet painting page covers this in detail.
Plan on two or three days of in-house work, with the full cabinet painting job done in one to two weeks. Dark shades like navy and charcoal take one more coat and generally one more day.
Cooking never stops. Dishes ride out the job on the bare shelving, and the single awkward day is when we spray the boxes.
Touch-dry and fully cured are two separate stages. Waterborne enamel copes with gentle use after about a week and keeps firming up for a month or so, while a catalyzed two-part polyurethane reaches full toughness overnight.
A complete kitchen usually prices out somewhere from $2,500 up to $5,500. Smaller rooms can open near $1,500, while big or two-colour kitchens go to $6,000 to $9,000 and past that. Counted by the door it is roughly $130 to $250, which puts a 24-door Applewood kitchen near $4,000 before any extras.
Keeping your boxes and buying new fronts runs from about $3,000 up to $10,000, and gutting the room for all-new cabinetry starts close to $15,000. Bonding primer, grain filler and lead-safe methods each raise the cabinet painting cost. Treat those as local ballpark figures; the written quote is the amount you actually pay.
The visit covers a door count, a material check and a test of any old paint, and you leave with a written cabinet painting quote at no charge. Call +1 (289) 206-9979, tell us about your kitchen or go back to our services.
Bathroom vanities, pantry cupboards, laundry cabinets and basement bars in side-splits get the kitchen's primer and enamel.
Original bungalow kitchens are small, closed rooms with solid wood or plywood cabinets that have often been painted several times already. Cabinet painting in these houses starts with the old layers, because what is under the top coat decides how the job is done.
See Bungalows
Oak lets brown tannin seep up through water-based primer, and its open grain telegraphs through colour unless it gets filled. So the first coat in oak cabinet painting is always a shellac-based primer that seals the tannin in.
See Oak Cabinets
With refinishing, the worn topcoat comes off by stripping or sanding, new stain balances the colour, and a sprayed clear layer protects the wood. It is our pick over paint when the timber is the most attractive feature of the kitchen.
See Refinishing
Spray equipment breaks the enamel into a fine mist that settles into one even film, with no brush lines or roller texture. That is the difference between cabinet painting that looks factory-made and a finish that looks homemade.
See Spray Painting
Shiny factory doors call for a bonding primer built to stick to slick faces, since an ordinary one just lets go. Sound melamine and laminate accept cabinet painting well, while thermofoil that has started lifting needs stripping or replacing first.
See Thermofoil and Melamine
With refacing, fresh doors and drawer fronts go onto the boxes you already have, and the frames are sprayed to match them. We can also swap just one or two damaged doors and finish them with everything else during cabinet painting, so the fix blends in.
See Refacing and New Doors
Two-tone cabinet painting puts one colour on the uppers and a deeper one on the lowers or the island. Plenty of people paint only the island, which is usually the simplest way to give the room a fresh centrepiece.
See Two-Tone and Islands
Painting a bathroom vanity usually takes one or two days, and the room is back in use quickly. We treat vanity cabinet painting as a full job, with primer and enamel chosen for daily steam and splashing.
See Bathroom Vanities
A condo galley usually has ten to fifteen doors and turns around quickly. Condo cabinet work depends on planning the elevator booking, the parking and the odour control with the building before any work starts.
See Condo Kitchens
Pantry cupboards, laundry cabinets, closet doors, bookcases and rec room bars go through the same steps as a kitchen. Since nearly all of them are fastened to walls, they are coated where they stand inside a plastic enclosure.
See Pantries and Built-Ins
We plug old knob holes until they disappear under the new colour and bore new ones through a jig so pulls line up exactly. While doors are off for cabinet painting, worn hinges are replaced with soft-close hinges.
See Hardware and Hinges
Our most requested shades are white, cream, greige, sage, navy and charcoal, but a tiny paper swatch rarely predicts how any of them will look at home. Our cabinet painting colour process sprays one of your real doors and leaves it with you for a few days.
See Colour ConsultationWe come out, count every opening, name the material and put the job in writing, free of charge.
Any detail helps, from door style to the year the house went up. We will call to pick a time, and only a name and phone number are required. If you would rather talk, call +1 (289) 206-9979.
