Every door and drawer front comes off, gets degreased, sanded, primed by substrate and sprayed, then goes back on adjusted hinges. Whole-kitchen cabinet painting keeps the boxes and the layout and changes everything a person actually sees.
Kitchens in Stanley Park, Alpine and Forest Heights arrive with the same three complaints: grease around the range, a worn finish at the handles, and a colour that dates the room. The order of operations that fixes all three does not change from house to house, and cabinet spray painting is the part that makes the doors look new rather than repainted.
What A Cabinet Painting Quote Lists Before Any Work Starts
The count comes first. Doors, drawer fronts, false fronts, end panels and open shelves are counted one at a time, because piece count is what a cabinet painting price is built from. A fourteen-piece galley is not a thirty-eight-piece kitchen with an island, and no estimate made by eye across the room is honest about the gap.
The quote then names the substrate, the degreasing method, the primer, the topcoat, the sheen and the number of coats, and it prices interiors, crown moulding and hardware as separate lines. Two cabinet painting quotes written that way can be compared line by line. One that says painting kitchen cabinets and gives a single total cannot be compared to anything.
Days On Site, Days Without Doors And The Cure Window After
A typical kitchen needs three days of cabinet painting on site, plus seven to twelve days of shop turnaround while the doors are sprayed and cured lying flat. Day one is degreasing, labelling and removal, and nothing gets coated on it.
Boxes and face frames are finished at the house inside that window, so the counter, sink and appliances stay in service and the kitchen works as open shelving. Cure is the part that gets underestimated. A two-component polyurethane is hard in about a day, while a waterborne alkyd enamel wants roughly a week ahead of normal service and a month ahead of full hardness.
What Kitchen Cabinet Painting Costs In Ontario In 2026
Most whole kitchens fall between $2,500 and $5,500. Small kitchens start from about $1,500, large or two-tone kitchens run $6,000 to $9,000 and past it, and the per-door market rate sits around $130 to $250. Those are market ranges for cabinet painting across the province, and the written quote is the number that applies to one particular kitchen.
Price moves with piece count first, then substrate, then colour. A saturated navy or forest green needs a third coat. Grain fill on oak adds a day of labour. Bonding primer for laminate and thermofoil adds $150 to $400. Heavily waxed cabinets need solvent degreasing instead of a water-based cleaner. Those five lines explain most of the spread between two cabinet painting quotes on the same room.
Painting Is Not The Answer For Every Kitchen
Doors that are swollen at the sink base, cracked through a rail or peeling their vinyl skin are past the point where coating helps. Cabinet refacing and door replacement puts new fronts on boxes that are still square, which is cheaper than replacement and better than painting over a failure.
Doors in solid white oak, cherry or walnut that are still in good order are often worth keeping as wood. Cabinet refinishing strips, re-stains and clear-coats them instead. Both answers get given at the visit, including when they cost the job.
Fixed Cabinetry Means On-Site Cabinet Painting
A built-in wall unit, a window seat or a fireplace surround cannot be taken to a shop. Those pieces get masked and contained where they stand, with plastic sheeting sealing the room, floors and furniture covered, and an extraction setup pulling air out through a window.
Removable parts still travel. Doors, drawer fronts and adjustable shelves come off and head for the booth, while the carcass work stays in the house. That split is the same one used for kitchen cabinet painting, and it produces the same finish on a bookcase that it does on a base cabinet.
Drilling New Holes From A Template During Cabinet Painting
A drilling jig clamps to each door and sets the pull at the same distance from the edge and the same height every time. Thirty doors done by eye will have thirty slightly different pulls, and the eye catches it across a room even when a tape measure barely does. A cabinet painting job gets judged at the handles more than anywhere else.
Centre-to-centre spacing has to match the hardware, and moving from knobs to pulls means new holes on every piece. Drilling is usually priced per hole, in the region of ten to fifteen dollars each, and it appears as its own line rather than disappearing into the total.
Book A Free Cabinet Painting Visit In Kitchener
The visit costs nothing and the written quote follows within a day or two. Call +1 (226) 271-7725, or send the door count through the form with a photo taken from the doorway. The full list of cabinet painting work also covers oak, thermofoil, islands, vanities, pantries and built-ins if the job is bigger than one kitchen.
Kitchen Cabinet Painting Questions
How many days is the kitchen affected?
Cabinet painting occupies the house for about three days, and the doors are away for a week to ten days. The counter, sink and appliances keep working while the boxes are sprayed behind containment.
Are the cabinet interiors painted?
Interiors are priced as their own line because they add real hours. Box interiors, shelf edges and door backs can each be added to the quote, so the choice is made with a number in front of it.
What if my kitchen has a lot of crown moulding?
Crown, light rail and trim are counted and quoted as separate lines. They are sprayed on site with the boxes, using the same primer and topcoat so the colour matches the doors.