Cabinet Refinishing in Chevy Chase, MD

The old casework is usually the best woodwork in the house and it is nearly always the part that has been treated worst.

Common findings, and what we do about them:

• Doors painted shut. Decades of coats have closed the gap between door and frame. The door gets cut free, the edges taken back where the build causes the bind, and the edges primed before the finish goes on.
• Original latches and hinges painted over. Cabinet latches from this era are worth keeping. They come off, get cleaned, and go back on. Painted hardware is the single fastest way to make old casework look neglected.
• Glass upper doors. Often original glass, sometimes with visible waviness, and the glazing or the stop holding it may be as old as the house. We mask and cut rather than run tape and hope, and where a stop has to come out it is labeled and goes back where it came from.
• Beaded face frames and inside corners. Far more perimeter than a modern flat frame. This is brush work, and it is where the hours are.
• Interiors and shelf edges. If the pantry is glass fronted, the inside is part of the finished job, including the back panel and every shelf edge.

The newer run beside it is a different problem. Factory finishes shed adhesion unless they are deglossed and primed with something rated to bond, and that step is invisible to anyone looking at the finished door, which is exactly why it gets skipped.

The pantry cabinetry is original to a house built well before 1978, so the paint on it is old paint, and sanding it falls squarely into the federal RRP question. The interior threshold is more than six square feet of painted surface disturbed in a room. A single floor to ceiling pantry run clears that several times over. Maryland is not an EPA-authorized state, so the federal rule applies directly here.

In practice that shapes the set-up in the room: the kitchen isolated at the doorway rather than draped, counters and appliances covered and sealed rather than sheeted loosely, sanding done with vacuum extraction at the tool or wet where the work allows, debris collected the same day, and no heat guns.

It also shapes the scope conversation. There is a version of this job where the old casework is taken back toward bare wood and a version where the build is knocked down, filled honestly and recoated. On pre-1978 painted cabinetry the second is usually the right answer, and we will say which one your pantry needs instead of quoting the cheap version and discovering the truth in week two.

Ask any contractor quoting pre-1978 cabinetry how they handle the rule, and check the answer rather than taking it on trust. What we will do is tell you what the rule covers on your scope and work clean in an occupied kitchen.

Doors and drawer fronts come off, get labeled by opening, and are cleaned, degreased, sanded and sprayed at our shop in Vienna. A sprayed door in a controlled space is a better finish than anything achievable in a kitchen with a family in it. Boxes, face frames, the pantry casework and any island paneling get finished in place, in a fully masked room.

Getting the doors out is where this neighborhood is different. Many of these houses have no usable driveway, a detached garage on a rear lane, or nothing but the curb. Loading twenty or thirty doors onto a truck means the truck standing on the street for a stretch of the morning, and on these blocks the street may belong to the municipality rather than the county. Several of the towns and villages inside 20815 administer their own curb and right of way, and several have their own start time rules.

So we establish which one you are in before we schedule, and we plan the load. Doors go out in one trip, wrapped, through a route we have covered: hall floor, threshold and stair if the pantry serves an upper landing. They come back in one trip. Nobody carries a door past your dining room twice.

Kitchens are not the only fitted woodwork in a house of this age, and the rest of it refinishes the same way.

Bookcases flanking a parlor fireplace. A window seat with a lift lid under a bay. A linen press or a built-in cupboard on an upper landing. Boxed radiator enclosures somebody added later. A mudroom or back hall with hooks and a bench built into it. Bathroom casework and a medicine cabinet recessed into plaster.

All of it can be refinished, and refinishing a built-in changes a room more than wall color does. It is also the work most often left out of a quote because nobody thought to count it. Fredy counts it.

You lose the cabinet doors for a stretch, not the kitchen. Boxes stay usable, the sink stays connected, and we agree in advance on which days the room is genuinely out of service for the in-place spraying and coating of face frames.

Drawers come out with their contents intact where you want them to. Hardware is bagged by opening, not thrown in one box. Every door goes back on the hinge it came off, which matters more on original casework than on factory cabinetry, because nothing in a hundred-year-old pantry is interchangeable.

Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. Same four-person crew every day since 2002, background checked, no minimum job size, so a single pantry run is a job we will take. Call 703-869-0593.