Cabinet Painting serving Framingham and Metro West MA.

Most kitchens in this city sit inside houses that are 50 years old or more; the census puts the median build year of local housing at 1966. A kitchen in a house that age has often been remodeled at least once, so the cabinets you are looking at might be 1980s or 1990s oak, builder-grade maple from a later renovation, or, in the oldest houses, painted built-ins that predate both.

Painting is a good fit when the boxes are plywood or solid wood, the layout still works, and the problem is color, wear or an orange finish that dates the room. It is a poor fit when the boxes are swollen particleboard under the sink or the layout itself is what you dislike.

Cabinet types to expect in houses of these ages

Each of these takes a different prep path. Oak gets a grain filler if you want a smooth modern look; maple needs a strong bonding primer because it is hard and slick; old painted built-ins need careful testing first, because the oldest layers may contain lead.

• Red oak with a clear or honey finish, common in remodels from the 1980s and 1990s; the open grain shows through paint unless it is filled
• Maple and birch doors with a tight grain that paints very smoothly once deglossed
• Site-built painted cabinets and pantry built-ins in pre-1940 houses, often with many coats already on them
• Thermofoil or laminate doors, which are usually not good candidates for paint because the skin can peel

Our process, door by door

Doors and drawer fronts come off and get labeled so they can be finished lying flat, away from the dust of a working kitchen, and returned to the right opening. The face frames and cabinet ends stay in place and are masked, cleaned with a degreaser, sanded and primed on site.

We use a primer chosen for the substrate and a hard-curing cabinet enamel rather than wall paint. Wall paint stays slightly soft and sticks to itself, which is why doors painted with it tend to stick and chip along the hinge side. Expect the kitchen to be usable but crowded for several days while frames are coated and doors cure.

If the hardware is changing, tell us before the estimate. New pulls that use a different hole spacing mean filling the old holes and drilling new ones before primer, not after.

Built-ins and older kitchens

Roughly 17% of housing units in the city were built in 1939 or earlier, a group the city's preservation plan traces from Greek Revival and Italianate houses through early-1900s Colonial Revival and bungalow forms. Homes like these may still have a butler's pantry, a china cabinet or painted kitchen cupboards that were built in place.

Built-ins like that are worth keeping, but they are also where we expect lead in the bottom coats. We test before sanding, and if lead is present, the sanding happens under lead-safe practices with containment and HEPA cleanup, as described on our lead-safe painting page. If you own one of the early-1900s houses in South Framingham and the cupboards are original, plan for that extra step.

Refinish or replace?

Replacing cabinets brings new countertops, plumbing and electrical disconnection, and often flooring patches where the old footprint was. Painting keeps all of that in place. If the counters are staying and the boxes are sound, refinishing usually makes more financial sense. Our refinish vs. replace guide walks through the trade-offs in more detail.