Cabinet Refinishing in Springfield, VA

A lot of Springfield kitchens have been half updated. The common versions we find:

• Original 1970s boxes with replacement doors from a refacing job, where the face frames were covered in a veneer or laminate skin that is now lifting at the edges.
• New doors and a new sink base, with two original uppers left beside the refrigerator in a different wood entirely.
• An added pantry or built-in desk in an oak that never matched the cabinets next to it.
• A peninsula added when a wall came down, built from whatever was on hand.

Paint is the one thing that brings a kitchen like that back together, because one color over four materials reads as one kitchen. What it does not fix is a lifting veneer skin on a face frame, so that gets reglued or cut back first. We look for it specifically, because a refaced frame is not obvious until you get a thumbnail under a corner.

Almost every kitchen of this generation has a boxed soffit running above the wall cabinets to the ceiling, and a scalloped wood valance over the sink window. Both date the room more than the cabinet color does.

The soffit is drywall, not cabinet, so there is a decision attached. Painted the wall color it disappears. Painted the cabinet color it reads as cabinetry and makes the uppers look taller. We show you both on the wall first, because the wrong call in a low kitchen makes the room feel shorter.

The valance we usually suggest removing. It comes off with four screws, there is rarely any damage behind it, and the window gets bigger for free. If you want it kept, it gets finished with the doors.

Modern cabinets use European cup hinges that adjust in three directions, so doors can be lined up at the end of a job. The hinges in these kitchens are usually semi-concealed wrap-arounds or surface mount, screwed to the frame face, and they adjust in no directions at all.

That matters twice over. Painting around them means pulling them off and refitting, because a painted hinge leaf stops working smoothly. And if your reveals are uneven now, they stay uneven unless the hardware changes.

Swapping to cup hinges means boring the doors and drilling new plates in the frames. Worth doing while the doors are off if they already sag. If they hang fine, we clean and reuse what is there and put new bumpers on the corners.

Before quoting anything we open the cabinet under the sink and look at the bottom and the back of the face frame. That one cabinet has had thirty or forty years of slow drips under it.

If the bottom is particle board swollen into a soft brown crumble, that is a material problem, not a finish problem. A new bottom in one cabinet is a reasonable repair and we do it. Racked frames, stiles split at the hinge screws and doors that no longer close are also repairs we make while the doors are off.

What we will not do is put a cabinet finish on boxes that are coming apart. If three or four are failing, refinishing is money spent on the part of the kitchen that was not broken, and we would rather lose the job.

A quote here comes from counting doors and drawer fronts, not square feet. Thirty raised panel oak doors with the grain filled is a different job from twenty slabs in the same size room. Soffits, valance removal, hinge changes and sink base repair get priced on their own so you can see what you are paying for.

Fredy Vargas does the counting himself. He started in 2002, he is on site every day the job runs, and there are four of us, the same four from the first morning to the last.

Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured. Weekdays 8 to 5, weekends by appointment if that is the only way into your kitchen. No minimum job, so a bathroom vanity or a laundry cabinet is real work to us. Ten percent off for veterans and for anyone 65 and over. We work out of Trevor Place in Vienna, so Springfield sits at the far end of our run and the next start date there can be a little later than closer to home. Call 703-869-0593 and you will get a real date.