Cabinet Refinishing in McLean, VA

Plenty of cabinets in this town are veneered rather than solid, and that decides how aggressively anything can be sanded. Modern veneer can be under a millimeter thick. Go through it at a corner and you have a dark glue line or bare particleboard, and there is no filling your way out of that on a door face.

How we check: look at the door edge for a grain pattern that does not continue around the corner, look for a thin contrasting line under the pull where hardware has worn it, and look at the raw panel edge inside a drawer opening. Stiles are often solid while the panel is veneered, so one door can need two approaches.

On a veneered panel we sand by hand, with the grain, at a fine grit, and keep machines off it. The goal there is adhesion and nothing else. Where someone has already sanded through, we show you, because that gets dealt with before primer rather than after.

The rebuild wave from the late nineties left a lot of McLean kitchens with factory painted shaker doors, MDF panels in a maple frame under a catalyzed white. Nobody wants those refinished. What they want is the three doors by the trash pull-out to stop looking beaten.

That is a harder request than a full repaint and we are straight about it. A factory catalyzed finish has a particular sheen and an off-white that has shifted slightly with years of light, so a field coating gets close but it is a match, not a continuation. The options are doing the whole visible run so everything is consistent, or doing the damaged doors and accepting that in raking light you may see a difference.

Where an MDF panel has swollen at the bottom edge under a dishwasher, that is water in a fiber core. Paint does not reverse swelling, so those doors get replaced and finished to match.

Glass fronted uppers are common in the bigger McLean kitchens and they take real time. A divided light door has twelve small panes, and every one of those edges is a hand cut line.

Where the glass is held by a removable wood stop on the back, it comes out, the door gets finished as a door, and the glass goes back in. That is always the better result. Where the glass is bedded in compound or permanently stopped, it gets masked precisely and the muntin faces and inside returns are cut in by hand. The inside return is what you see when the cabinet light is on, and it is the part other crews skip.

Leaded and seeded glass we treat as fragile. If a door is worth more than the labor to finish it, we say so before carrying it anywhere.

The 22102 side of McLean is towers and stacked units, and the kitchen in one of those has constraints a detached house does not.

• The doors have to leave the building and come back. That means a service elevator reserved, the elevator pads in place, and the lobby and corridor floor protected on both trips.
• Management usually wants a certificate of insurance before anyone starts. We carry the insurance and send it over.
• Work hours are set by the building, not by us. Many will not allow a start before eight or any work on a Sunday.
• There is no window and no real exhaust in most of these kitchens, so we use low odor waterborne cabinet coatings, move air toward the unit door, and keep the corridor door closed.
• Unit kitchens are small, so the work in place is usually a single day, which matters when you live there.

We have no job minimum, so a fourteen door condo kitchen is a job we take. Not every company set up for estate work will.

Fredy Vargas comes out himself and takes the time to identify the cabinets before quoting, because in McLean the identification is the quote. Steel, solid wood, veneered panel, frameless particleboard, thermofoil and factory catalyzed MDF are six different jobs and they do not cost the same.

He counts the doors and drawer fronts, checks the edges for banding and veneer wear, looks for rust in a metal sink base, checks the grease beside the range, and asks what you want the box interiors to look like. Then you get a number for that kitchen.

Fred General Painting is ten minutes away at 8040 Trevor Place in Vienna, working in McLean most weeks since 2002. Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured, the same crew every day. Ten percent off for veterans and for anyone 65 or older. Call 703-869-0593.