Interior Painting
Kitchen Cabinet Painting in Calgary
Cabinet paint jobs don't fail because of the colour. They fail because of what happened in the four hours before the first coat.
We visit your home, then you get a written price and a start date.
McAra Design + Build gives you a fixed price in writing before any work begins. The baseline is cabinet boxes brushed and rolled in place, with doors and drawer fronts sprayed off site. Filling the wood grain on oak, painting an island a second colour, or a kitchen with a lot of doors all raise the price.
Prep time is listed in the scope of work. It's the biggest share of the labour on this job, and it's the reason one cabinet paint job still looks new after five years while another chips within five months.
What's involved
Prep work, the right products, and enough time to dry.
- 01Removing and labelling doors and hardware
- 02Degreasing
- 03Sanding and dulling the old shine
- 04Filling wood grain where needed
- 05Bonding primer
- 06Sprayed finish coats on doors and fronts
- 07Cabinet boxes finished in place
- 08Drying time before doors go back on
- 09Rehanging, lining up and adding hardware
What we check that others don't
What we check that others don't.
- §1
How much cooking grease is on the doors near the stove. This is the main reason cabinet paint peels, and you can't see it. Degreasing with the right cleaner has to happen before any sanding, because sanding a greasy door just presses the grease into the surface. The doors on either side of the stove get cleaned twice.
- §2
What the cabinets are actually made of. Solid wood and MDF (a dense manufactured wood panel) take paint well. Thermofoil (a plastic coating heat-wrapped onto the door) and melamine (a plastic-coated panel) do not, unless you use special bonding prep, and some thermofoil doors can't be painted successfully at all — the coating just lifts off. We check the material before quoting, and we'll tell you plainly if the doors need to be replaced instead.
- §3
Whether you want the wood grain to still show. Open-grain oak painted as-is still looks like painted oak. If you want a smooth, modern-looking door, that takes filling the grain first, and that's real extra labour on every door. We settle this before quoting so nobody is surprised when the doors go back on.
- §4
Where the doors will be sprayed and how long they need to dry. Sprayed finishes are what make cabinet doors look factory-made instead of hand-painted. They also need days to fully harden before they can be handled, stacked or bumped. Doors put back on too soon is how a good finish gets ruined in one afternoon.
- §5
The hinges and alignment before we start. Painting the cabinets means every door goes back on the same hinge it came off. If the hinges are worn or the doors are already crooked, this is the moment to fix it, and it costs almost nothing while the doors are already off.
How long it takes
One to two weeks, most of it drying time.
Doors come off on day one and go to the spray shop. Cabinet boxes are prepped and painted in the house over three to four days, and the kitchen stays usable with the doors off.
Finished doors need to dry and harden before they're handled and rehung. Rushing that step is the single most common reason a cabinet finish chips at the edges within a year, so it's built into the schedule instead of skipped.
We put it in writing.
- A fixed price
- agreed before we start, and it doesn't move unless you change the scope.
- A completion date
- in the contract, not a range, not a best guess.
- A workmanship warranty
- if it fails because of how we installed it, we fix it. No argument, no invoice.
Most renovation guarantees are a paragraph of conditions. Ours is three commitments you can hold us to.
Questions people ask before they book.
- Grease left on the door before priming, skipping the step that dulls the old shine, using the wrong primer for the material, or hanging doors back up before the paint has fully hardened. McAra Design + Build treats all four as prep and scheduling issues rather than product issues, and that's where most of our labour hours go on a cabinet painting job.
- Melamine can, with the right bonding primer and prep work. Thermofoil often can't — the plastic coating lifts under heat and solvent, and no primer McAra Design + Build has tested fixes that for good. We identify the actual cabinet material at the quote stage and tell you when replacing the doors is a better use of your money than painting them.
- Yes, unless the doors have their grain filled first. Filled and sprayed oak looks like a smooth, modern painted door; unfilled oak still looks like painted oak underneath. McAra Design + Build treats both as valid choices and figures out which one you're expecting before the quote is written, since filling the grain adds labour and cost.
Where this sits
This work is part of Interior Painting.
People looking at this page usually look at Popcorn Ceiling Removal and Kitchen Cabinet Refacing in the same conversation.
Get a free in-home quote.
We visit your home, then you get a written price and a start date.
What are you planning?
Or call Chris directly: +1 (587) 837-3113