Kitchen cabinet refinishing

A kitchen full of solid oak or maple cabinets from the 1990s is usually structurally fine and merely the wrong colour. Refinishing sprays the doors and frames rather than replacing them, and it is the single largest-value job in residential painting: a decent refinish costs roughly a fifth to a tenth of new cabinetry and takes a week instead of a month.

Step one: decide whether yours are candidates. Solid wood and wood-veneer doors refinish beautifully. Thermofoil, the vinyl-wrapped MDF common in builder kitchens from the 2000s, is a poor candidate because the wrap lifts at the edges and paint will not reattach it. Melamine and laminate are possible with the right bonding primer but carry more risk. A painter should look at a door edge in daylight and tell you honestly which of these you own.

Step two: strip the kitchen. Doors and drawer fronts come off, get labelled by position and go to a spray shop or a controlled area on site. Hinges and hardware are removed and bagged. The frames stay in place and the kitchen gets sealed off with plastic and a zip door, because atomised finish travels and nobody wants it on the fridge.

Step three: clean, sand, fill, prime. Kitchen cabinets carry years of cooking grease, and no coating sticks to grease. Everything is degreased, usually twice, then scuff sanded to break the existing sheen, then any grain that you want filled gets filled, which matters with oak because its open grain will read through a painted finish unless it is grain-filled. Then a bonding primer, sanded again between coats.

Step four: spray the finish. Two coats of a cabinet-grade product, usually a waterborne alkyd or a catalysed acrylic, sprayed rather than brushed because brush marks on a cabinet door are visible forever. Frames are sprayed in place. Doors are sprayed flat, on both faces, with cure time between.

Step five: cure and rehang. This is the part people rush and regret. Cabinet coatings are touch dry in hours but reach full hardness over days to weeks. Doors are usually rehung after three to seven days, and the honest advice is to be gentle with them for the first month: no bumper pads sticking to soft film, no heavy cleaning products, and expect a little blocking sound when a door opens for the first few weeks.

How long it takes. An average Ottawa kitchen of twenty to thirty doors and drawer fronts is five to eight working days, with the kitchen usable but doorless for most of it. Off-site spraying can be faster and gives a cleaner result but means your doors are away for the duration.

What it costs in Ottawa in 2026. Indicative. A small kitchen of fifteen to twenty doors is commonly $3,000 to $4,500. An average kitchen of twenty-five to thirty-five doors and drawer fronts is usually $4,500 to $8,000. A large kitchen with an island, a pantry and crown moulding can run $8,000 to $12,000. What moves the number: door count rather than floor area, whether oak grain is being filled, whether the interiors are being done, on-site or off-site spraying, and whether new hardware is being fitted. Compare that against $25,000 and up for replacement cabinetry in the same kitchen and the arithmetic usually settles itself.

What makes an Ottawa kitchen different. Housing stock, mostly. The suburbs built between 1988 and 2005, which is a great deal of Barrhaven, Kanata and Orléans, went up with solid oak or maple raised-panel doors on decent boxes. Those are the ideal candidates and there are tens of thousands of them. The infill and condominium stock in the core is more often thermofoil or laminate, which is a harder sell. The other local factor is winter air. A house running at 25 per cent relative humidity in February cures a waterborne coating differently from the same house in July, and a spray shop with temperature and humidity control will give a more predictable result in January than an on-site job in an unheated garage.

Who should do the work. Again, no licence exists for painters in Ontario, and cabinet refinishing is not a regulated trade (Skilled Trades Ontario, Painter and Decorator (Commercial and Residential), trade code 404C). What separates a good refinisher from a general painter is equipment and product: a fine-finish spray setup, a proper containment and extraction arrangement, and a cabinet-grade coating rather than wall paint. Ask what gun and what product. Ask to see a door they have done that is at least two years old. Confirm liability insurance and WSIB coverage (WSIB, Expanded Compulsory Coverage in Construction).

What to ask before you hire. Are my doors good candidates, and why. On-site or off-site spraying. Which product, and is it made for cabinets. Are you grain-filling the oak. How many coats, and is there sanding between them. Are cabinet interiors and shelf edges included or extra. How long before I can use the doors normally. What is the warranty on chipping and peeling, and what does it exclude. Who fills the old hinge holes if I am changing hardware.

One caution worth stating plainly. Refinished cabinets are durable but they are not as hard as a factory-catalysed conversion varnish, and the edges of doors near a sink or a dishwasher are where wear shows first. That is a fair trade at a fifth of the cost, but it should be a decision you made knowingly rather than a surprise in year three.