Cabinet Refinishing in Reston, VA

The original doors in these houses are mostly flat slabs: a plywood core, a very thin veneer face, and a glued edge band. That is good news and bad news.

• Good news. A slab has no panel and no profile, so it lays out flat and finishes close to furniture grade.
• Bad news. There is almost no material to work with. Where veneer has chipped at a corner, and it is nearly always the door beside the sink and the one under it, sanding a filled repair can go straight through to the core.
• Edge banding lifts. A loose band gets reglued and clamped, or cut back and filled, before primer rather than after.
• If veneer has bubbled from a leak, that door is done. We price a replacement to match the run instead of painting over a blister.

Oak doors from a later remodel are the opposite problem. The grain is open and deep and paint does not fill it, so a painted oak door still looks like oak unless the grain is filled first. That is a real added step and we quote it as one.

Cluster houses came with carports, shared parking bays and very little storage. There is usually nowhere on the property to rack forty doors and nowhere enclosed to finish them.

So the doors and drawer fronts leave. They are numbered, their hardware bagged to the same numbers, and they go to our shop in Vienna to be finished flat on racks, then come back and get hung and adjusted. The dust and the smell go with them.

Boxes and face frames stay, because they are screwed to your house. Those are done in place with the counters, backsplash, appliances and floor covered.

The most common request we get now is darker bases and lighter uppers. It photographs well in a closed kitchen. In a Reston contemporary, where the cabinets are one end of a room you are sitting in, a split across the wall run often just reads as unfinished from the far side.

What usually works better is one color on the perimeter with the contrast on the peninsula or island face, low down, where a sofa back hides half of it anyway. We pick that color against the adjoining wall and whatever stained wood is staying in the room, not against a chip in a store.

Sheen matters more than color in an open house. Semi-gloss on a long run of doors facing a glass wall throws the window back at you from across the room, so we end up on satin in these kitchens more often than not.

The condominium kitchens are a different building with the same argument. A unit at Lake Anne plaza level or in one of the Town Center buildings has a fixed footprint, no route for a dumpster, and a plan where demolition means weeks of no kitchen. Refinishing is usually the only sensible way to change one.

Two practical notes. The doors go down once and come back once, so the building only has to let us through twice. And nothing with a solvent odor gets used inside, because the air path is shared with the rest of your stack.

In a colonial you shut the kitchen door and eat in the dining room. In an open Reston house, masking the kitchen takes part of the living room with it, and people underestimate that.

So we sequence it. Doors come off the first morning and go out, which moves the bulk of the hours off site. The in-place work on frames and boxes is the stage that blocks the room, and we keep that to the shortest run we can. You keep the sink, the fridge and the range the whole time.

Pull out what you use daily before we start, and when we finish leave the doors slightly ajar for a few days so two fresh surfaces are not pressed together while the film is still hardening.

Pricing follows door and drawer count rather than kitchen size. A compact cluster kitchen with thirty doors and two corner lazy Susans is more work than a larger one with eighteen slabs. Grain filling, veneer repair and new hardware holes each add to it.

Fredy Vargas comes out, counts the doors, looks at what they are made of, checks how heavy the grease is beside the range, and prices it himself. He started the company in 2002 and is on site every day a job runs. Four employees, the same crew from the first morning to the last.

Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured, with the certificate sent to your cluster or condominium association when they ask. No minimum job, so a vanity or a single built-in is real work to us. Ten percent off for veterans and for anyone 65 and over. Call 703-869-0593.