Cabinet Refinishing

The Job Is Mostly Removal

People hire a painter expecting the hours to go into painting. On old cabinetry they do not. On a typical Pasadena bungalow kitchen we will spend something like four days taking material off and one day putting material back, and the finished result depends almost entirely on the first four.

The reason is arithmetic. Dried paint film runs around one and a half thousandths of an inch per coat, which is nothing on a flat wall. A quarter-round bead on a face frame is an eighth of an inch of relief. Stack seven repaints across eighty years and you have buried a meaningful fraction of that detail under paint, with every inside corner rounded and every cove partly filled. Nobody made a single bad decision. It just accumulated.

So we subtract. Strippers on the moldings and the profiled edges, worked with plastic and brass detail tools rather than steel, because old growth fir is soft and a steel scraper will bruise the grain in a way that shows through the finish. Poultice where a cove is deep enough that a single pass will not reach the bottom. On flat panels we often do not strip at all: if the existing film is sound and well bonded, a hard scuff and a bonding primer is the right call and stripping it would be wasted money.

Testing Before Anything Gets Disturbed

Household paint carried lead until 1978, and the housing stock we work in mostly predates that by decades. We test the layers we intend to open. If it reads positive, the method changes: wet stripping instead of dry abrasion, the work area contained, HEPA extraction on anything that does generate dust, and the waste bagged and handled properly rather than swept into a trash bag.

This is not a formality in a kitchen. It is the room where food gets prepared and where the youngest people in the house spend a lot of their time, so an open dry sand on an unknown old film is simply not a defensible way to work.

Repairs That Have To Happen First

Eighty-year-old cabinetry has usually developed a few specific faults, and they all get worse under a fresh coat rather than better.

Hinge mortises wear oval, so the door sags and the reveal goes wedge-shaped. The fix is a hardwood plug glued into the old screw holes and the mortise re-cut, not a longer screw. Glue joints on doweled doors let go at the bottom rail, where the years of steam collect, and those get pulled apart, cleaned and re-glued square. Stiles split along the grain near a strike plate. Dents in a rail will often steam back out most of the way if the wood fibers were crushed rather than cut, which is worth trying before reaching for filler.

Filler goes in last and in thin passes. Packing a corner full of compound to save a step is how you lose the corner, because that is exactly where the profile lives.

Priming for What Is Actually Underneath

An old kitchen is rarely one substrate. In a single run of cabinets we will commonly find original oil-based enamel, a stretch of bare fir where the stripper reached wood, tannin-prone open grain near a joint, and a yellowed greasy patch on the doors closest to the range.

Those want different primers, and they are not interchangeable. Bonding primer over sound glossy enamel. Stain-blocking, often shellac-based, over tannin and over smoke or grease shadows that will bleed through a waterborne product no matter how many coats you put on. Degreasing before any of it, because a kitchen door carries a film of aerosolized cooking oil that nothing sticks to.

Finishing Doors Flat and Off the House

Doors and drawer fronts come off on the first day, get labeled on the hinge edge, and are finished horizontally. That is not convenience, it is physics: a coating laid on a flat surface has time to flow out and level, while the same coating on a vertical door face starts sagging and pooling in the lower part of every cove.

Waterborne alkyd is the default. It levels like an oil, cures genuinely hard, and does not amber over a light color the way traditional oil enamel did within a couple of years. On a busy family kitchen we will sometimes go to a two-part urethane, which is tougher but far less forgiving of a mistake in application. We sand between coats. The goal is a film that is thin, even and hard, not thick, because thick is soft and soft is what blocks against the frame on the first hot week of September.

Boxes and face frames get done in place, brushed and rolled, with the cut lines done by hand. Cure time is not dry time: the doors will feel dry within hours and will not be fully hardened for two to three weeks, so we go back on the hinges with felt bumpers and we tell you to be gentle with them for the first fortnight.

Call (626) 747-2676 and ask for a single test door before you commit to the whole kitchen.