With refacing, fresh doors and drawer fronts are hung on your current cabinet boxes and the frames are finished to suit. If just one door is ruined, we swap that one out and spray it with the others during cabinet painting so nobody can tell.
In Meadowvale we are asked for the one-door fix far more than full refacing. A bottom rail that swelled from a sink leak, a panel with a crack down the middle, or a thermofoil door peeling beside the dishwasher are small problems. None of them means you need a new kitchen.
Start with the boxes. When they are level, dry and tight to the wall, painting your current doors is almost always the best value.
Next, look at the doors themselves. Vinyl coming loose, veneer worn through by an earlier sanding, particleboard swollen from water and cracked centre panels are all beyond what paint can repair. With two or three of those, we replace just those doors. With most of the kitchen like that, refacing is the better plan.
Also think about the layout. If the kitchen works for you, refacing or cabinet painting keeps it. If it does not, new paint or new doors will not fix that, and we will be honest about it.
In this part of the GTA, cabinet painting for a complete kitchen typically falls in the $2,500 to $5,500 band. Refacing, meaning new fronts on your present boxes, usually lands between $3,000 and $10,000, with door style and piece count setting where you fall.
Gutting the room for all-new cabinets begins near $15,000 and can go beyond $40,000. Swapping a lone door is usually a few hundred dollars, and after the whole set gets its cabinet painting coats, nobody can spot it. Use these as local market figures, since your signed written quote sets your actual price.
If we paint only the new door, it will never match its fifty-year-old neighbours. So the whole kitchen is primed and sprayed in the same session, with the same products and the same number of coats, and the new door disappears.
The style has to match too. A plain slab is simple to copy. A routed 1970s door can often be made by a door shop. An arched 1980s oak door is hard to copy, and a shaker door among raised panels will look like a patch. When a close copy is not possible, you hear about it before any order is placed.
Hinges can change the plan. Many 1970s kitchens in Meadowvale use exposed or half-hidden hinges that nobody sells anymore, so a new door usually has to be drilled for a hidden hinge.
With one new door, that may mean changing hinges across the whole run so they all look alike. We price that choice up front. See our hinge page for the options.
Cabinet boxes from the 1970s and 1980s often beat today's budget cabinets for strength, with full backs, true face frames and joints still tight after decades. Replacing them with new particleboard rarely makes sense when cabinet painting can keep them.
Meadowvale has thousands of these kitchens on both sides of Winston Churchill Boulevard, many in houses that were never renovated. Our 1970s and 1980s kitchen page makes the full case for keeping them.
Hold off on buying doors until somebody has inspected the boxes. At the visit we check that they sit level, test for moisture, identify the door material and count how many doors truly need replacing. Then we write up cabinet painting and refacing as two separate prices. Phone +1 (289) 206-9922, ask for a visit, or head to our home page.
Backsplit bathrooms, laundry rooms, mudroom lockers and rec room bars get the coatings we trust in kitchens.
We take your doors and drawer fronts down, clean off the grease, sand them, prime them for their material and spray a hard enamel before hanging them again. Kitchen cabinet painting recolours the entire room while your counters, tile and sink stay untouched.
See Kitchen Cabinets
Dark stain, slab doors with routed grooves and printed wood-grain fronts all accept new colour once the grease and old gloss are gone. On a kitchen this age, cabinet painting is mostly careful prep, and that prep decides how long the finish lasts.
See 70s and 80s Kitchens
Oak brings two problems to the job that maple and MDF do not. Tannin in the wood stains through water-based primer, and deep grain lines show through cabinet painting unless they are filled flat first.
See Oak Cabinets
Some cabinets have wood that deserves to be seen. Refinishing takes the worn finish off, evens out the colour with new stain and seals it with a sprayed clear coat, so the grain stays in view instead of disappearing under paint.
See Refinishing
Spraying puts the coating on as a fine mist that levels itself before it dries, so there are no brush lines left behind. With a sprayer, cabinet painting comes out looking like it left a factory, not a hobby bench.
See Spray Painting
Melamine, laminate and thermofoil are slick by design, so cabinet painting on them depends on a bonding primer built to grip plastic surfaces. Sound doors finish beautifully, while vinyl already curling away from its board is past saving.
See Thermofoil and Melamine
Soft white or greige on top with sage, navy or charcoal below is the combination we are asked about most, and the island usually gets the darker shade. Painting an island by itself also counts as a full cabinet painting job.
See Two-Tone and Islands
A single vanity needs a day or two of our time, which makes it the least disruptive cabinet painting job we offer. Its doors travel to our booth, we spray the base where it sits, and the bathroom is ready again soon after.
See Bathroom Vanities
Most condo kitchens hold between ten and twenty doors, which means the spraying is quick once building approvals are in place. Cabinet painting in a condo townhouse or apartment runs smoothly only when parking, work hours and smell are planned ahead.
See Condo Kitchens
Laundry uppers, pantry cupboards, bench-and-locker units by the garage door, bookcases and fireplace built-ins all go through the primer and sprayed enamel your kitchen gets. Because nearly all of them are attached to the house, cabinet painting for these rooms happens on site behind plastic.
See Pantries and Built-Ins
Leftover knob holes get plugged and filled flush, and every new pull is bored through a jig so the whole row sits straight. Tired hinges get replaced during the same window, since cabinet painting already has the doors off.
See Hardware and Hinges
Meadowvale kitchens we quote mostly end up in one of six shades: sage, greige, cream, warm white, charcoal or navy. A little paper chip under store lights cannot show how any of them behaves in your room, so one of your own doors gets sprayed in the shade you like and propped up in the kitchen before any cabinet painting goes on the calendar.
See Colour ConsultationWe drop by, count doors and drawers, check the wood or board underneath and spell out the work in a written quote. No charge for any of it.
Jot down anything you know about the cupboards, and we will call to choose a day. A name and a number are all it takes. Want to talk right now? Call +1 (289) 206-9922.
