How Refaced Cabinet Doors Are Made in Vaughan
Your kitchen is untouched for about four weeks while the doors are built. It is the stretch that decides how the kitchen looks in ten years, and it happens entirely out of sight.
The four weeks nothing appears to happen
The single most common surprise about refacing is that most of it is invisible.
From the day a quote is signed, roughly four weeks pass in which your kitchen is completely untouched. You cook in it, you use every cupboard, nothing is masked and nothing is missing. Then a five-day week arrives in which the whole thing changes.
That sequencing is on purpose. Nothing comes off your cabinets until the parts replacing them physically exist, which is the difference between a kitchen out of action for five days and one out of action for a month while somebody waits on a supplier.
Doors built to your openings, not ordered from a catalogue
Every opening in your kitchen is measured during the consultation. Not estimated from a photograph, not assumed from the age of the house — measured, in the room, by the person who will be responsible when the gaps do not line up.
Doors are then built to those numbers. This is the part most refacing companies do not do: the common model is to order fronts from a door supplier in the nearest stock size and fit them, which is faster and cheaper and is why the reveals between doors on some refaced kitchens wander by a few millimetres across a run.
Building to the opening is also what makes an odd cabinet possible — the narrow filler run, the corner that is not square, the cupboard somebody added in 1997.
Why the finish happens in a booth
A finish is only as flat as the air it dried in.
In a spray booth the air is filtered and moving in one direction at a controlled speed, so nothing lands in a wet coat. Temperature and extraction are steady, which means each coat cures the way the product was designed to rather than the way the weather allowed. Doors are sprayed flat, both faces, with a proper cure between coats.
None of that is achievable in an occupied house, and that is the honest reason doors go away to be finished rather than being done where they hang. A kitchen cannot be made as clean as a booth, however much sheeting goes up.
Your boxes are the exception, because they are screwed to the wall and are not coming off. They get the same 2K polyurethane, sprayed in place behind zipper walls and filtration during the installation week — which is most of the reason that week is five days rather than two.
What the equipment does and does not change
It is easy to oversell machinery, so here is where it genuinely shows.
Finish quality is largely an equipment question. Even atomisation, a consistent film thickness and a controlled cure are what make a colour read the same across forty doors rather than nearly the same. That consistency is very difficult to achieve by hand and almost impossible to achieve on site.
Joinery quality is largely not an equipment question. A door is square because someone measured and set up correctly. Good machines make that faster and more repeatable; they do not make it happen. Anyone selling refacing on machinery alone is describing half the job.
The half that matters more is that the people who measured your kitchen, the people who built the doors and the people who spray your boxes are the same crew — so there is nobody to blame at the handover, because there is no handover.
What you should expect to hear during the four weeks
Not much, and that is normal rather than neglect.
The doors are in production, the dates are already set, and the next thing that happens is somebody arriving to take the old fronts off. If the schedule moves, you hear about it before the date rather than on it — a kitchen you have planned a week around is not something to be vague about.
What this is a part of
The manufacturing weeks described here are the front half of a job whose back half is five days in your kitchen. The two are worth reading together, because almost everything people worry about belongs to the second and almost everything that determines quality belongs to the first. Reading what refacing replaces and what it keeps sets out which parts of your kitchen are being replaced and which are being kept, and the doors below are the replaced half being built.
What the shop time costs
Four weeks of manufacturing is most of what you are paying for, and it is the part of a refacing quote that is hardest to see. Doors are priced by count rather than by the size of the room, which is why two kitchens of the same footprint can differ by thousands. Reading what a refaced kitchen actually comes to, and what moves the number shows where the money actually goes, and it is the natural next question once the process makes sense.
Questions
Common questions about how the doors are made
- Where are the doors made?
- In our own shop, by the same crew that installs them. That is the unusual part — most refacing companies order doors in from a supplier and fit them, so the door and the sprayed boxes come from two different places and are matched after the fact rather than made together.
- Why spray in a booth instead of in my kitchen?
- Dust and air movement. A booth filters the air and holds it steady, so nothing settles into a wet coat. A kitchen cannot be made that clean, which is why doors sprayed on site never quite have the flat surface a booth-finished one does. The boxes are the exception — they cannot come off the wall, so they get sprayed in place behind containment.
- Does better equipment actually change the result?
- On the finish, yes and visibly. Consistent atomisation and a controlled cure are what make a coat even across a whole kitchen instead of good on some doors. On the joinery it matters less than the person operating it — a well-cut door is mostly the result of someone measuring your openings properly.
- What happens to my kitchen during those four weeks?
- Nothing at all. You keep using it exactly as you were. No work happens at your house until the doors exist, which is deliberate — the alternative is a kitchen pulled apart while everyone waits on a delivery.
- How are the doors matched to my cabinets?
- Every opening is measured during the consultation, not estimated from photographs. Doors are then built to those openings rather than picked from stock sizes, which is what keeps the gaps even across a run.
Want the four weeks to start?
Send wide photographs of each run of cabinet and we will come and measure. The written quote comes back inside 24 hours, and the shop time begins once the doors are signed off.
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Refaced. Repainted. Refinished.