Cabinet Refinishing in Herndon, VA

This is the biggest technical issue in a Herndon kitchen. A dark oil stain under a white or light gray finish does not stay put. The colorant is soluble, it migrates up into a waterborne coating, and it shows as a blotchy tan or pink haze, worst in the open grain and the profile corners.

It also does not appear right away. The first coat looks clean and the bleed arrives overnight. We have been called into kitchens where someone else primed and coated a whole set of doors before finding this on the second morning.

The answer is a stain blocking primer rather than a bonding primer alone, usually shellac based on the worst of it. We prove it on one door: sand, block, coat, then leave it overnight under the kitchen lights before committing the other thirty.

Oak grain is the related question. Sanding does not close those pores, so a painted oak door stays smooth to the touch with the grain visible under the color. A flat modern face means filling the pores first, which is an added step we price separately.

Downtown is a different job. The houses around Station Street and up Elden mostly went up between 1890 and 1920, and their kitchens were built in place by a carpenter: face frames nailed to the wall, beadboard backs, flat panel doors, butt hinges, a tall broom cupboard, and sometimes a glass front section that has been painted a dozen times.

Old paint on site built cabinets is layered and brittle, applied without much sanding between generations. Doors bind because the hinge side has picked up an eighth of an inch of coating, corners are filled in, and the bead detail is half buried.

We work these with the old coatings in mind: surfaces kept wet while scraping, no power sanding of aged paint in the open, the area contained with plastic, the floor vacuumed and damp wiped at the end of each day. Where a profile has disappeared under too many coats, the options are stripping those pieces or accepting a softer detail, and we say which is worth the money on your kitchen.

McNair Farms on the Fairfax County side of 20171 mixes detached houses, townhouses and condominium buildings, and Great Falls Chase puts 336 townhouses around its shared recreation area. The kitchens in the attached units are a different animal from the ones in Fox Mill.

They are small, often with no exterior window, and the run is broken by a pass-through to the dining side. The boxes are frequently melamine over particleboard, with thermofoil doors over a fiberboard core. Melamine coats well with the right bonding primer. Thermofoil lifted at the corner nearest the oven will not be reattached by paint, and we say that at the estimate rather than after.

Ventilation is the other constraint. A recirculating hood with a charcoal filter moves nothing out of the room, so we push air toward a door or window on another wall and use low odor waterborne products. In a stacked building your air is partly your neighbors.

On a kitchen this old the finish is not the only tired part. With the doors and drawers out, it is the moment to deal with the hardware, and it costs little extra while the openings are empty.

• Bottom mounted epoxy-coated slides from the seventies bind and drop. Most openings take modern side mount slides instead.
• Exposed hinges that have loosened usually have stripped screw holes. Holes get plugged with glued dowel and redrilled, not filled with putty.
• Drawer boxes with a loose front get glued, pinned and squared before anything is coated.
• Moving from knobs to pulls means the old hole gets plugged and the new centers get drilled on a jig so every pull in the run lines up.
• Swapping visible hinges for concealed cup hinges is a door modification, and we will tell you whether your doors can take it.

Fredy Vargas goes through the kitchen with you. He counts doors and drawer fronts, works out whether the boxes are solid wood, veneered plywood or melamine, looks at how dark the stain is and where the grease is heaviest, and checks whether the hardware is worth keeping.

Three decisions move the number: grain filling on oak, whether the box interiors get done, and hardware work. Those are priced as separate lines so you can choose.

Herndon is the western end of our run, so we batch work out here and give you a realistic start date rather than an optimistic one. Fred General Painting has been at this since 2002, from 8040 Trevor Place in Vienna. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured, same crew every day. Ten percent off for veterans and anyone 65 or older. Call 703-869-0593.