Cabinet Refinishing in Annandale, VA

The rambler kitchen here is usually at the back or the side of the house, walled on three sides, with a doorway to the hall and sometimes a swinging door to the dining room. Being its own room makes it easy to close up, so dust and odor stay in one place. What it has none of is cross ventilation, so the doorways get sheeted and we move air out rather than relying on the window over the sink.

A split level is the opposite problem. The kitchen sits half a flight up and the wall usually ends at a half wall over the lower level, so there is no doorway to shut. Containing dust means sheeting that opening, and it decides whether the family room downstairs gets a gray film over everything. Every door also travels those stairs past a tight turn at the landing, so the treads and the handrail get protected and we carry rather than stack.

Annandale has a lot of original owners and long tenures in one house. A kitchen that has had one family cooking in it since the sixties carries a film you cannot see and can barely feel, and paint will not stick to it.

It is heaviest above and beside the range, on the underside of the uppers and around every handle. Everything gets degreased, rinsed and dried. On a kitchen this old that is real time, and it decides whether the finish lasts or starts chipping at the pulls by next winter.

Two other residues turn up in houses this age. Silicone from decades of spray furniture polish causes fisheye, small craters where the coating pulls away from itself, and it has to be cleaned off rather than buried. Tobacco residue bleeds through water based paint as a yellow stain weeks later, and that gets a sealing primer, not another wash.

Most ramblers and split levels here came with a carport, a breezeway or an attached single garage, which is a practical advantage Annandale has over the tighter towns in our area.

It means the doors can often be finished on site. We rack them flat under a roof with real air movement, keep enough of the drive clear that you can get a car past, and save a day at each end because nothing travels twice.

It is not automatic. A carport open on three sides under oaks and tulip poplars is a pollen problem from late March into May, and a wind-blown speck in a wet door is a sand and recoat. In those weeks we screen the space or send the fronts to the shop instead, and we decide that at the estimate.

Plenty of these kitchens were altered once, usually in the nineties, when the wall to the dining room came out or a pass-through was cut in it.

What that leaves is two vintages in one room: original birch on the outside walls, a newer run of oak or maple where the work happened, and a filler strip between them that matches neither. People live with it for years because stain colors are nearly impossible to reconcile. Paint is what finally does reconcile them, and that is the strongest argument for painting rather than refinishing back to wood here.

What paint will not fix is shape. A raised panel door beside a flat slab is still two different doors, and if that would bother you the answer is replacing a few fronts rather than coating them.

Not every kitchen here is worth refinishing, and we would rather say so at the estimate than halfway through.

Worth keeping: solid birch, gum or maple boxes with real face frames, doors that hang square, drawers on wood runners that still close. That describes most original Annandale cabinetry.

Not worth it: a particle board sink base swollen from an old leak, a run that has racked so the doors no longer sit in one plane, or a later budget remodel with thin melamine carcasses delaminating at the toe kick. Paint does not hold any of that together.

Fredy Vargas looks at it himself, opens every door, checks under the sink and counts the fronts, because the count drives the number more than the size of the room. Annandale is a short run down Gallows Road from our shop in Vienna. Working since 2002, Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured. No minimum job. Ten percent off for veterans and anyone 65 or over. Call 703-869-0593.