Cabinet Painting for Newton, MA homeowners.

Kitchens here sit in houses of very different ages. The housing stock runs heavily to homes from 1939 or earlier, with a second large group from the 1950s and a smaller wave of houses built since 2000. A kitchen in a house that old has very likely been redone at least once, and cabinets from a remodel twenty or thirty years ago are often sound enough to paint rather than tear out.

Before suggesting anything, we open doors, look at the edges and the inside of the boxes, and check what finish is on them. Solid wood, veneer over plywood, MDF and thermofoil each take paint differently, and one of them does not take it well at all.

Reading the cabinets you have

• Solid oak with an open grain, typical of 1980s and 1990s remodels: paints well, but the grain shows through unless it is filled first
• Maple and cherry with a factory catalyzed finish: very hard and slick; needs thorough scuffing and a bonding primer
• Painted MDF doors from a 2000s or later kitchen: easy to repaint, but edges swell if water has gotten in
• Thermofoil or laminate: peeling foil cannot be painted; we will tell you if replacement doors make more sense
• Original painted built-ins, butler's pantries and china cabinets in older houses: often many coats deep, and likely to contain lead

Built-ins in prewar houses

Glass-front cupboards between a kitchen and dining room, linen closets with drawers, and pantry shelving survive in many older homes even after the main kitchen has been redone. They are worth keeping, and they are usually painted wood with a long history of coats.

In housing from before 1978, sanding those layers is lead work. Massachusetts requires lead-safe renovation practices for paid work that disturbs more than six square feet of painted surface in a room, and a full pantry or a run of built-ins passes that easily. We contain the area, sand with HEPA extraction or use wet methods, and clean to a verified standard. Our lead-safe painting page explains the process in more detail.

Refinish or replace?

With the median owner-occupied home here valued around $1.26 million, people sometimes assume the answer is always a new kitchen. Often it is not. If the boxes are plywood, square and dry, and the layout works, painting gives a new look for a fraction of the disruption, and the countertops and plumbing stay put.

Replacement makes sense when boxes are particleboard swollen from leaks, when doors are thermofoil that is lifting, or when you want to change the layout anyway. Our article on cabinet painting vs. replacement goes through the trade-offs, including how long a painted finish lasts in a busy kitchen.

How the work is done

Doors and drawer fronts come off and are labeled so every piece goes back where it was. We degrease everything, because cooking residue is the main reason cabinet paint fails, then scuff-sand and prime with a primer chosen for the existing finish. Doors are sprayed in a controlled area; the boxes are sprayed or brushed and rolled in place with the kitchen masked off.

The topcoat is a hard-curing enamel made for cabinets rather than ordinary wall paint. It feels dry within hours but needs days to cure fully, so we reinstall carefully and ask you to go easy on the doors for the first week or two. Our cabinet painting process post has the step-by-step.

Keeping a kitchen usable

With seven in ten homes here lived in by their owners, a cabinet job often means working around a household that still needs to cook. We plan the sequence so the sink and at least part of the counter stay usable, and we keep the spraying and drying of doors out of the kitchen. If you are repainting the walls at the same time, the interior painting page for Newton covers that side of the work.