Cabinet Refinishing Davie, FL

We start at $2,500, and that one is ours. It is a floor rather than a quote: it is the smallest refinishing job we take on and still do the preparation the finish depends on, and where your kitchen lands above it comes out of the written estimate after we have looked at your doors. There is also a published figure for the work, roughly $2,000 to $3,500 for a kitchen's cabinets, and that one is not ours, it is the market's. What moves you inside a number like that is the count of doors and drawer fronts rather than the size of the room, whether the finish is transparent or opaque, how much repair the wood needs first, and how ornate the door profile is, because a routed profile is sanded by hand and a flat door is not. The face frames and the exposed sides of the boxes are not a variable, because they are coated along with the doors. Be careful comparing a refinishing number against a refacing number as though they were two prices for the same work. One changes the color of your kitchen and the other changes its style.

Yes, and by a wide margin, because the two jobs buy different things. Both of them treat the whole visible kitchen, doors and drawer fronts and face frames alike, so what separates them is not how much they cover but what they do to it. Refacing replaces the doors and the drawer fronts and skins the face frames with a new surface, manufactured and delivered to your house. Refinishing keeps the doors you already own, recoats them, and recoats the frames and exposed sides along with them, and nothing new arrives beyond the coating. That is why refacing can put a different door profile in your kitchen and refinishing cannot. The catch is that the saving is only real when refinishing can do what you want. It changes the color and nothing else, so a kitchen whose problem is an ornate door profile gets a different color and the same dated shape, at which point the cheaper job was not cheaper, it was wasted. When the doors are solid wood, square and in a shape you still like, refinishing is the honest answer. When any one of those three is false, refacing is.

No, and this is the answer that surprises people most on the phone. Rigid thermofoil, melamine, laminate and printed foil doors are all a thin surface bonded to a core of MDF or particleboard. Refinishing works on the material underneath: it gets cleaned, prepared, sanded where it needs it and recoated, and on those doors the material underneath is the core, not wood. Sand through the film and you are into a substrate that will not take a finish and cannot be put back. Veneered doors fail for a related reason: the wood layer over the core is thin enough that a full sanding can go through it, and once it does the repair is a new door. The hinge side of any door settles it in a minute, and if the edge shows a seam or a band of different material, refacing or replacement is where your options are.

It will, unless somebody fills it, and this is the question nobody knows to ask. Oak is a ring porous hardwood: it has large open vessels running through it, and paint does not bridge them. The Forest Products Laboratory's wood handbook lists oak with the hardwoods known for large vessels, and says vessels that large have to be filled to get a smooth finished surface. It calls red oak the more challenging one to finish, because those vessels run concentrated in a band. Filling is a separate step before the primer, done with a paste or liquid filler packed across the grain and sanded back once it dries, and it takes real time. Skipped, the door still looks like oak from across the room, just white oak instead of honey oak, and no number of topcoats changes that later. So the useful thing to ask any company quoting you a white kitchen is not what paint they use. It is whether grain filler is inside the number.

There are two numbers here and they answer different questions. Getting on the calendar normally takes one to two weeks from the day you approve the estimate. That is our usual scheduling window rather than a promise, because it moves with what is already booked ahead of you, so ask what it looks like the week you sign. The work in your kitchen is then two to three days, and that is the part that affects your life. The boxes stay on the wall and you keep using what is inside them, and what you lose is the doors and the drawer fronts while they are off. You cook the whole time. The part people underestimate is not the work, it is the wait afterwards. A coating is dry to the touch quickly and hard much later, and doors put back into service before the finish has cured carry the marks of it permanently. Ask for the cure dates in writing alongside the work dates.

Nobody can give you an honest number for that, and the figures quoted online are not measurements. The lifespan is decided by things you can check before you sign. Preparation comes first by a distance: a coating on wood that was cleaned of thirty years of cooking oil, repaired, sanded flat and properly sealed lasts a different order of time than the same coating sprayed onto a surface that was only scuffed. After that it is the coating and how many coats went on, and then it is where the door lives: the two that go first are always the one under the sink and the one beside the range, because one gets water and hands and the other gets heat and grease. A company that gives you a confident number of years without asking what your doors are made of is quoting a brochure.

That depends on what is being applied and where, which is why it is a question to ask before you sign rather than the morning the work starts. Part of the answer is fixed by the work itself: the face frames and the exposed sides of the boxes are attached to your kitchen, so they are prepared and coated in your kitchen no matter who does the job. The doors and the drawer fronts are the part that can be coated somewhere else, and where they go decides how much of the curing happens in the room your family eats in. Neither arrangement is wrong. What is wrong is finding out which one you bought by smell on day two. Ask three things and get them in writing: what product is going on your doors, where it is being applied, and how many days it needs before the doors hang. If someone in the house has asthma, or there is an infant, say so at the estimate rather than on the day.