Cabinet Refinishing in Burke, VA

Almost every Burke house has an attached two-car garage, which is the best finishing space we get anywhere in our area. Enclosed, out of the pollen, a door we can open for air, room to rack a full kitchen of doors flat. What we need from you is the cars out for the week.

One thing we check first. Plenty of Burke garages have the water heater or furnace in them with a standing pilot. Finishing materials go nowhere near an open flame, so if that appliance cannot be shut down the doors go to our shop. We settle it on the walk-through, not on the morning.

In winter the garage is too cold besides. Coatings need real temperature to flow out and harden, and a February garage at 45 degrees gives a soft film that never cures properly. Cold months, the fronts travel.

The standard Burke kitchen has three features that are not cabinets but are part of the job, and people are surprised to see them priced.

• The bulkhead above the uppers. A framed and drywalled box to the ceiling, usually the wall color. Taking it to the cabinet color makes the uppers read taller in an eight-foot room, and the line where it meets the face frame is cut by hand.
• The pass-through to the family room. A cased opening over the sink, or a peninsula with uppers hanging over it, finished on both faces, which means masking a second room too.
• The built-in desk. A knee-hole cabinet with a shallow upper, common in the seventies and eighties stock. It gets refinished with everything else, or it is the thing people ask us to remove, and removing it leaves a hole that needs a panel and a filler before anything gets coated.

The valance over the sink window belongs on that list too. Leaving it in the old color gives away the whole job.

The hinges on an original Burke kitchen are semi-concealed wraparound hinges, brass plated, with a leaf wrapping the back of the door. Forty years of use means stripped screw holes, a bent leaf where somebody hung on a door, and fronts sitting a quarter inch out of line.

Three options, and they are not the same money. Reuse what you have, with stripped holes plugged and redrilled, which works if the leaves are straight. Replace with the same pattern, which is the usual answer. Or convert to European cup hinges, which means boring a 35mm cup in every door and fitting new plates, and gives three-way adjustment afterward.

The conversion is worth considering while the doors are off and at the shop, and it is a poor idea later, because boring a finished door chips the film at the cup. If the brass is what you want gone, say so at the estimate, not on the day the doors come back.

A Burke kitchen is open to the family room, holds the table everybody eats at, and is the route from the garage door into the house. It does not go out of service quietly.

So we set up a temporary kitchen before the doors come off. The microwave, the coffee and the dishes move to the dining room table, which has the space. The fridge, sink and range stay usable. What you lose is everything behind a door, and a bank of base cabinets masked open is not somewhere to reach blind past a wet frame.

Since the kitchen is the way in from the garage, the path through to the hall stays taped and walkable. Plenty of our clients here are out on the VRE or the Parkway before we arrive and back after we pack up, so we do the noisy work early, leave the house locked and clean each evening, and send photographs if you want them.

Fredy Vargas counts the fronts, because the count drives the price more than the size of the kitchen. He checks the sink base for old leak damage, looks at the hinges, feels the film beside the range and says whether the grain needs filling for the color you want.

He will also say where refinishing stops making sense. Boxes swollen under the sink, a run racked so the doors no longer sit in one plane, or a later thermofoil door lifting at the oven are not problems a coating fixes.

Ask about the wet bar in the walkout lower level and the bathroom vanities while he is there. They are the same oak from the same year, and doing them in the same week costs a fraction of a separate visit.

Burke is a straight run down the Fairfax County Parkway from our shop at 8040 Trevor Place 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.