A full kitchen renovation in Vancouver starts around $40,000 and goes up fast. Painting solid, well-built cabinets costs a small fraction of that and can completely change the room. Here's how to tell whether your kitchen is a candidate, and why cabinet painting is its own craft.
Which cabinets are worth painting
The honest answer: most of them. Solid wood, plywood, and MDF boxes in good structural shape take paint beautifully. The oak kitchens of the 80s and 90s, the original fir built-ins we find in Kerrisdale and Arbutus Ridge homes, even dated melamine can be refinished with the right primer.
The exceptions are peeling thermofoil doors, water-swollen particleboard, and boxes that are physically falling apart. Paint makes surfaces beautiful. It doesn't make broken things whole, and we'll tell you straight if replacement is the smarter spend.
Why DIY cabinet jobs fail
Cabinets are the hardest painting surface in a house. They get grabbed, scrubbed, splashed, and slammed hundreds of times a week, and kitchen grease soaks into finishes in ways walls never experience. Skip the degreasing, the sanding, or the bonding primer and the new paint peels at the handles within months.
The other giveaway is texture. Cabinet doors want a glassy, factory-smooth finish, and a brush and roller almost never get there. That finish comes from spray equipment and products most homeowners don't have.
How the pros do it
A proper cabinet refinish runs like a small production line:
- Doors and drawer fronts come off and get labelled, so everything returns to its exact hinge.
- Every surface is degreased, scuff-sanded, and vacuumed. Boring, essential, non-negotiable.
- A bonding primer locks onto the old finish so the topcoat has something to grip.
- Doors are sprayed flat in a controlled space with a hard-wearing enamel, while frames are sprayed or fine-finished on site.
- Everything cures properly before rehanging, because enamel needs days, not hours, to reach full hardness.
Most kitchens take about a week door to door, and the kitchen stays usable for most of it.
Colours that age well
Trends come and go faster on cabinets than anywhere else, so we usually steer clients toward colours with a long shelf life: warm whites, soft creams, sage and forest greens, and deep navy on islands. If you want the whole room to hang together, we'll happily match wall colours to the new cabinets as part of a larger interior painting project. That's the cheapest moment to do it, since the crew is already there.
What it costs and how to start
Every kitchen is different, so pricing depends on door count, condition, and finish, but it reliably lands at a tenth or less of a renovation. The way to find out is simple: book a free estimate, and we'll count the doors, check the surfaces, and give you a firm number with zero obligation. Worst case, you'll finally know what the facelift costs.
