Kitchen Cabinet Painting in Monmouth County

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey puts about 41,000 of Monmouth County's roughly 272,000 homes in the 1980s, more than any other single decade, and about 29,000 more in the 1990s. Together that is roughly a quarter of the county's housing, and much of it is in the inland townships we drive through every day: Marlboro, Morganville, Holmdel, Colts Neck, Freehold, Howell, Wall Township and Tinton Falls. Those houses were built in the years when a kitchen meant solid red oak or maple doors with a clear or honey finish, and a lot of those kitchens are still in place, now thirty or forty years on.

They are the best candidates for cabinet painting we see. The face frames and boxes are usually plywood or solid wood, the doors are raised-panel or flat-panel in hardwood, and the factory finish has worn through around the sink and the handles rather than failing everywhere. Red oak has an open grain that shows through paint as a texture, which some homeowners like and some want gone. If you want a smooth, modern surface, the grain is filled and sanded flat before priming, and that adds a step we price in the estimate rather than discover later.

In the larger houses in Holmdel and Colts Neck the kitchens were often upgraded during the 2000s to cherry or stained maple, sometimes with a glaze rubbed into the door profiles. Those finishes are hard and slick, and they are exactly the surfaces where a cabinet paint job succeeds or fails on preparation: the factory topcoat has to be degreased and sanded to a dull, even scratch, and a bonding primer used, or the enamel will chip at the door edges. Stained cherry also bleeds tannin through light colors, which a stain-blocking primer stops. We decide which primer each kitchen needs at the estimate, not on the first morning.

The other common request in these houses is a two-tone kitchen: perimeter cabinets in a white or light gray and the island in a darker color, or the reverse. That is straightforward to do in the same visit, because the island is sprayed as its own unit anyway. Our guide to kitchen cabinet paint colors walks through the whites, grays, blues and greens homeowners choose most often for both.

On the bayshore, in Keyport, Hazlet, Aberdeen, Matawan, Middletown and New Monmouth, the housing runs earlier: Monmouth built about 70,000 homes in the 1950s and 1960s, a quarter of today's stock, and a lot of them are capes, ranches and split-levels along Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay. Kitchens there are smaller, often a galley or an L, and many still have the original solid-wood boxes behind a later set of doors, or doors that have been painted once already.

Cabinet painting suits those kitchens because the door count is low and the cost of replacement is out of proportion to the size of the room. The questions are usually about what is underneath: older cabinets may have an oil-based finish, or several finishes, that needs a bonding primer, and hinges and screw holes worn by sixty years of use need attention before rehang. We fill and re-drill blown-out screw holes, and if you are changing to new knobs or pulls with a different spacing, the old holes are filled before the cabinets are primed.

Bathroom vanities, laundry-room cabinets and painted built-ins such as bookcases and pantry cupboards in these houses can go into the same scope as the kitchen, sprayed with the same enamel so they match.