Cabinet Painting and Refinishing in Raleigh

What Cabinet Painting in Raleigh Actually Involves

Most of a cabinet job happens before any finish is sprayed, and the photo above is what that stage looks like. Doors and drawer fronts come off and get labeled so every one goes back exactly where it came from. The boxes and face frames stay put, and everything that is not getting painted disappears under paper and plastic.

Then the part nobody enjoys. Kitchen cabinets carry years of cooking grease, and grease is the single most common reason a cabinet finish fails. Every surface gets degreased, rinsed and dried before a single piece of sandpaper comes out. Skip it and the paint sits on top of a film instead of bonding to wood, and it will peel at the handles and around the stove within a year.

After that comes a scuff sand to open up the existing finish, filling where it is needed, and a bonding primer made for slick surfaces. Only then does color go on.

Cabinet Refinishing, Refacing or Replacing

These three get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing, so it is worth knowing which one you are actually asking for.

Refinishing

Your existing boxes and doors stay. They get cleaned, sanded, primed and sprayed a new color. This is what most people mean by cabinet painting, and it is the right answer whenever the boxes are structurally sound and the layout works.

Refacing

New doors and drawer fronts, with a veneer over the existing boxes. It changes the door style as well as the color, which refinishing cannot do.

Replacing

Everything comes out. Worth it when the boxes are water damaged, when the layout needs to change, or when you are moving plumbing and appliances anyway.

The test is the boxes. Open a door and press the bottom of the cabinet under the sink, the spot that takes every slow leak. If it is firm and square, refinishing will give you a kitchen that looks new. If it is soft or sagging, paint is cosmetics over a problem. We will tell you which one we are looking at. There is more detail in our guide on refinishing or replacing kitchen cabinets.

Which Cabinets Take Paint Well, and Which Fight It

The material under the old finish decides how the new one looks, and this is worth settling before you pick a color.

Maple, poplar and MDF

The easiest. Tight grain, no texture to telegraph through, and they finish out glass smooth. Most cabinets built in the last twenty five years are one of these.

Oak

Oak has deep open grain that shows through paint no matter how many coats go on. You have two honest options: fill the grain first, which adds real labor, or let it read as a painted oak kitchen, which plenty of people like. What does not work is pretending three coats will bury it.

Thermofoil and laminate

These are a vinyl or melamine skin over particle board, not wood, and they are a different job. Where the skin is peeling or bubbling at the edges, usually next to the oven, paint will not fix it. We will look and tell you straight whether it is worth doing.

Already painted

Usually fine, as long as what is under there is sound and not chipping. If the previous coat is lifting, it comes off first, because a new finish is only as good as the layer it sits on.

Cure Time Is Not the Same as Dry Time

A cabinet finish is dry to the touch in hours and fully cured in weeks. Those are different things, and the gap between them is where most new cabinet jobs get damaged.

During the cure, the finish is still hardening. Stack heavy dishes against a door, run tape across a drawer front, or wipe it with a strong cleaner too early and you will leave a mark in a finish that would have shrugged it off a month later. We hang doors and leave you with plain instructions on what to avoid and for how long.

Because of the dry time between coats, a kitchen runs several days rather than a single visit. Anyone promising a full cabinet kitchen sprayed and rehung in a day is either skipping coats or skipping the degreasing, and both show up later.

Cabinet Painters Near Raleigh, NC

If you are looking for cabinet painting near Raleigh, NC, we spray kitchens across the whole metro and the process above is the same wherever the house is. Most weeks that means somewhere in Wake County, but we regularly work in Cary, Apex, Garner, Wake Forest and Fuquay-Varina and Holly Springs too.

The same crew that quotes your kitchen is the crew that sprays it, and the answer when something will not work is the same every time: we would rather tell you before we start than after.