Cabinet painting in San Diego

Cabinet painting in San Diego usually costs $75 to $150 per door and drawer, which works out to roughly $3,000 to $9,000 for a typical kitchen. The price depends on the number of doors, the condition of the cabinets, and whether you add glazing or special finishes. It's a fraction of the cost of replacement.

For solid, well-built cabinets, painting is the smarter value. It costs 30 to 60 percent less than replacement, takes days instead of weeks, and delivers a fresh, factory-smooth look without the mess of a full remodel. We'll tell you honestly if your cabinets are good candidates during the free estimate.

Very durable when done correctly. We degrease, sand, and prime for adhesion, then spray a hard cabinet-grade enamel that resists chips, grease, and daily use. A sprayed finish has no brush marks and cleans easily, and our cabinet work is backed by a 2 year warranty.

Solid wood and plywood-box cabinets are excellent candidates, and most San Diego kitchens built from the 1980s onward have exactly that. What we will tell you honestly is where painting is the wrong call: thermofoil doors that are already lifting from the substrate, particleboard boxes swollen from a long-term leak, and doors so warped they no longer sit flat. Paint does not fix a structural problem, and covering one just delays the same conversation.

• Solid wood and plywood boxes — ideal, the finish holds beautifully
• Oak with heavy open grain — paintable, but the grain shows unless it is filled first, which we price separately
• Thermofoil already peeling from the MDF underneath — replacement doors are the honest answer
• Water-swollen particleboard — fix the leak and the box first, paint afterwards

Doors, drawer fronts and hardware come off first and are labelled so every piece returns to the opening it came from. Those get sprayed in a controlled area rather than in your kitchen, which is what produces the factory-smooth finish and keeps the overspray out of your home. The boxes and face frames are prepped and sprayed in place behind containment. You keep use of the kitchen for most of the job — you lose the doors, not the room.

• Every door and drawer numbered to its opening before removal
• Containment and masking over counters, appliances and flooring
• Boxes sprayed in place, doors sprayed off the kitchen
• Hinges and hardware refitted and adjusted on reinstallation

If the house was built before 1978, yes. Sanding original cabinetry or the surrounding trim in a home of that age disturbs paint that may contain lead, which falls under the EPA's Lead-Safe Renovation rules. Our crews are EPA Lead-Safe Certified, so that work is contained, wet-sanded and cleaned up to standard. It matters in a kitchen more than most rooms, because it is where food is prepared — and a great deal of San Diego's central housing predates that line.

Much better than it used to be, because we spray waterborne cabinet enamels rather than the solvent lacquers this trade once relied on. Those carry far lower volatile organic compound levels, which is what drives both the odour and the indoor air-quality question. In practice the boxes are touch-dry within hours and the kitchen is usable the same evening, though the enamel keeps hardening for a couple of weeks — so treat the doors gently at first rather than slamming them.