Keep your doors, change the color.
Cabinet repainting
If your doors are solid and you only want a different color, spraying them is the cheapest route to a kitchen that looks new. I take them off, prep them, spray them, and hang them back on the same hinges.
My cheapest option, priced after the measure
Within two working days of the visit. No deposit is taken until the quote is signed.
The count of doors and drawer fronts sets most of the figure. A dark door going to a pale color needs an extra coat, which is the rest of it.
What you get
Sprayed properly, which is most of the job
Almost all of the difference between a repaint that lasts and one that peels happens before any color goes on: degreasing, sanding the sheen back, and choosing the primer that suits what your doors are actually made of. That is the part nobody sees and the part I will not hurry.
- The lowest-cost option by a distance
- Sprayed, not brushed — no brush marks
- Hardwearing cabinet-grade finish
- Usually done in two or three days
Every door on your kitchen goes through my hands twice, once coming off and once going back on. — Francisco Carrillo, owner, cabinetmaker and fitter
Before you book
Can your doors actually be painted?
This is the one job where I say no fairly often, and it comes down to what the doors are made of rather than how they look.
This is right when
- The doors are solid wood or MDF. Real wood and painted or primed MDF both take a cabinet coating and keep it.
- You like the door, not the color. The shape stays exactly as it is. Only the color changes.
- The doors still hang straight. No sagging, no split rails, no swollen bottom edges.
- Budget is the deciding factor. Nothing else I do changes a kitchen this much for this little.
This is wrong when
- The doors are thermofoil or vinyl-wrapped. Plenty of kitchens fitted since the nineties are. The wrap is a film over MDF, and once it has lifted at a corner or bubbled beside the oven there is nothing sound for paint to grip. I have been asked to spray them anyway. The answer is still no.
- The finish is already peeling or flaking. Whatever made the last coat let go is still in there. Sanding and recoating buys you a year, and then you pay me twice.
- You want a different door. Paint cannot turn a raised panel into a slab and it cannot put glass in an upper. New doors is that job, and it is the one I would quote you for.
- The doors are damaged. Water swelling along a bottom edge or a delaminating drawer front reads straight through any finish, and a pale color shows it more than the color you have now.
The money
Against custom replacement doors
Spraying is my time and the materials. New doors are my time, the materials, and me cutting and building forty pieces of joinery to your sizes first. If the color is the only thing you want changed, the cheaper line is the honest one, and I will point at it myself.
No deposit is taken until the quote is signed.
Cabinet repainting
My time and the materials
Color changes. Door stays.
custom replacement doors
That, plus building every front from scratch
Color and the door both change.
Questions
What people ask me before they say yes
- How long am I without a kitchen?
- You are never without one. The doors come off on the first morning and the boxes stay where they are, so the sink, the oven and the fridge keep working. The doors go back on day three in most kitchens. What you lose is the doors, not the kitchen.
- Will it chip?
- Yes, eventually, in the places you would expect: the edge beside the trash, the door under the kettle, the one the vacuum catches. A sprayed cabinet coating is hard and it is what I have on my own kitchen, but it is not the baked factory finish on a new door and I am not going to tell you it is. If that sentence bothers you, buy doors instead. I leave you a touch-up pot of the exact color either way.
- Do you spray the cabinet frames too, or only the doors?
- Both. The doors and drawer fronts come off and get sprayed flat, which is the only way to lay a coat down with no runs. The visible frames and end panels stay in the room, and I mask them and spray them in place. Doing the doors alone is cheaper and it looks half finished, so I do not offer it.
- Can you paint any door?
- No, and this is the question I turn work down over. Solid wood and painted or primed MDF hold a coating. Thermofoil and vinyl-wrapped doors do not, because the wrap lifts with heat and paint cannot grip something that is lifting. If I open your doors at the measure and find a seam peeling at a corner, I will say so and walk, rather than take your money for a finish that fails inside a year.
- The color on my screen is not the color in my kitchen, is it?
- Not exactly, no. Every screen shifts color, and a north-facing kitchen pulls a warm white cold. I bring sprayed sample doors in your shortlist and leave them with you. Look at them in the morning, look at them at night with the lights on, and hold them against the countertop. Nobody is waiting on you, and the quote holds either way.
Pick the color on your own kitchen first
Most people change their mind twice between the swatch and the room. Do that part online, for nothing, before I come out. Send it over when you have settled on two and I will reply within one working day.