Esta página tiene el resumen en español. El texto largo todavía está en inglés. Fredy habla español, así que para cualquier pregunta llame al 703-869-0593 y le atiende directamente.
Cabinet Refinishing in Tysons, VA
Most Tysons kitchens are in a condo or a townhouse, and a good share of them have doors that are film over board rather than wood. Knowing which you have is the first thing worth establishing.
Thermofoil and melamine are not wood, and we will say so
Kitchens in the buildings and townhouses put up from the late eighties onward are full of two materials that look like cabinetry and do not behave like it.
Thermofoil is a vinyl film heat-wrapped over a shaped MDF door. From two feet away it reads as painted wood. Up close, the giveaway is a seamless wrapped edge with no joint and no end grain anywhere. Sanding it does not give tooth, it cuts through the film. Where it has already lifted and curled at a corner, usually beside the oven or above the dishwasher vent, no coating reattaches it.
Melamine is a resin-saturated paper pressed onto particle board, almost always with a separate edge band. It is what the box interiors and many slab doors are made of in the newer towers. A proper bonding primer will stick to intact melamine. It will not stick to a chipped edge band or a swollen corner, because there is nothing underneath to stick to.
So: intact melamine is workable with the right primer and a realistic expectation. Peeling thermofoil is a door replacement conversation, not a paint one, and we would rather lose the work than coat it and watch it fail at the same corner in a year.
What the doors are made of depends on when the tower went up
There is a rough timeline to this and it tells us most of what we need before we arrive.
- Seventies stock, the Rotonda buildings and their contemporaries. Real wood doors, often stained dark, on particle board frames. These refinish well and they are the best candidates in Tysons.
- Late eighties through the nineties. Golden oak fronts, and thermofoil starting to appear on the cheaper runs. Mixed, so the doors get checked one by one.
- Two thousands onward, including the newer buildings near the Boro and the Greensboro side. Factory-finished maple or MDF doors under a cured conversion varnish, plus melamine interiors. That factory finish is harder than anything we apply, and it has to be deglossed thoroughly or nothing grips it.
Nothing gets sprayed inside the unit
There is no garage to rack doors in, no driveway to park a van in, and the balcony is not ours to use even if the wind allowed it. Overspray in a sealed unit has nowhere to land except your floors and your own windows.
So the doors and drawer fronts go out. They are numbered, the hardware is bagged to the same numbers, and they travel down once and come back once, which also means your building only has to let us through twice rather than every morning. They are finished flat on racks at our shop and returned hung and adjusted.
The boxes and face frames have to be done in the unit, because they are fixed to it. Those get worked by hand and with a fine roller behind full masking, with the counters, cooktop, floors and any exposed plumbing covered.
Grease builds up faster in a kitchen with no window
A condo kitchen is typically interior, with no window and a recirculating hood that filters air and pushes it back into the room. Nothing leaves. Twenty years of that puts a heavier film on the cabinets than the same cooking would in a house with a through-wall exhaust.
Degreasing is the step that decides whether the finish holds, so it gets real time here: doors, frames, inside edges, panel recesses, and the tops of the uppers where a film collects that nobody has ever wiped. We also bring fans and filtration to move air while coatings flash off, because a film with no airflow over it stays soft.
Dust and the fan coil return
Sanding cabinets makes fine dust and a unit has nowhere to put it. The mistake is leaving the HVAC running while you work, which pulls that dust into the fan coil and then distributes it through every room for the next month.
We shut the system down for the sanding stages and cover the return grille, then clean up before it goes back on. Sanders run with vacuum attachment rather than open, and the debris leaves in bags rather than being swept into a corridor bin.
A slab also transmits noise. An orbital sander on a face frame is audible in the unit below, so the loud stages stay in the middle of the day rather than the first hour.
Low odor because the corridor shares your air
We use waterborne cabinet and trim enamels in these buildings and we do not make an exception for a kitchen. The older towers in particular move air between units through shared risers and under doors, so an oil enamel in your kitchen gets noticed on another floor.
Current waterborne products from Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore level out and harden into a film that takes a fingernail, so keeping the odor down is not a tradeoff against durability any more. While we are working in the unit the entry is sealed and filtration runs, and the hallway side of the door is left to the building.
The vanity, the laundry closet and the built-in wall unit
A lot of the cabinet work we do in Tysons is not the kitchen. Units from the seventies and eighties have a golden oak vanity in every bathroom, a cabinet over the washer and dryer, and frequently a built-in wall unit or a desk run that came with the apartment.
These refinish exactly like kitchen cabinets and a single vanity is a one-day job. Two differences: a vanity lives in constant humidity, so the finish wants to cure before the shower goes back into daily use, and the cabinet over a stacked laundry carries a film of lint and fabric softener that behaves like grease and has to be washed off. There is no minimum job, so one vanity is work we will take.
Before we quote, we want to touch the doors
All of it comes down to one walk-through. Fredy Vargas comes to the unit, opens doors, looks at the edges and end grain to establish what the fronts actually are, counts them, and checks what is intact and what is already lifting. That is not a judgment anyone makes from a photograph, and on thermofoil it is the whole question.
He has run this company since 2002 and he is on site every day the job runs. Four employees, so the same names go on the access list each morning.
Virginia contractor license 2705098145, licensed, bonded and insured, and we send the certificate to your management company before the start date. Weekdays 8 to 5, within whatever window your building allows. Ten percent off for veterans and for anyone 65 and over. We are on Trevor Place in Vienna, a short run in from either Metro stop. Call 703-869-0593.
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