Kitchen Remodeler in Toronto — Most Kitchens Do Not Need Gutting

North York is a postwar suburb that got built twice. The first pass put up bungalows and side-splits through the fifties and sixties, and a great many of those kitchens are still carrying their original cabinetry — solid frames, real timber doors, and forty years of amber lacquer that has gone the colour of weak tea. The second pass, from the nineties onward, filled in with builder kitchens whose doors are thermofoil over MDF and whose boxes are stapled particleboard.

Those two houses want opposite things, and the wrong service on either one is money burnt. The sixties kitchen usually has timber worth uncovering and frames that will outlive the people in the house. The nineties kitchen frequently has a sound layout wrapped in a material that cannot be repaired once the foil starts lifting at a corner.

So the first question is never what you want done. It is what you have got. That is answerable from photographs, it is answerable in a day, and it costs nothing — which is why we ask for the photographs before quoting anything.

The number people brace for is weeks. The number that matters is five days.

A refacing or repainting project runs four to five weeks end to end, and for four of those your kitchen is entirely normal. Your doors are being built or sprayed at the shop; your carcasses are where they have always been, holding what they have always held. You cook, you wash up, you use every appliance. The only visible difference is open shelving where the fronts used to be, which people report liking rather more than they expected to.

The week you feel is the installation week. Frames get sprayed in place behind containment, and for two or three days of it we ask you to be out of the house, because 2K is solvent-based and it is not something to sleep next to. Then the fronts come back, the hardware goes on, and it is finished.

For a countertop replacement running alongside, the stone template happens the day the old top comes off and the new one lands about ten days later — which is why we schedule it against the cabinet work rather than after it.

Both are priced on the door and drawer count plus the days on site, not on the square footage of the kitchen. A galley with twelve doors and a U-shape with twenty-six narrower ones can be the same floor area and different prices, because each door is what gets handled, prepped, sprayed and hung.

Which of the two you need moves the number more than the count does. A sixties kitchen with solid timber doors is usually a repaint — degrease, sand, prime, spray, done, and the frames need less correcting because they were built properly the first time. A nineties builder kitchen with thermofoil starting to lift is almost always a refacing job instead, because a delaminating door cannot be repainted back onto itself; it has to be replaced.

Material moves the number too, on the refacing side specifically. Painted waterproof MDF is the value end and carries the longest warranty; solid hardwood stained under clear 2K, for a kitchen where the grain is the point, is the top of it. Hardware, crown moulding and any panel-ready appliance fronts are quoted as their own lines, so you can see what each one costs before deciding whether to keep it.

We count from photographs in nearly every case, and the written quote follows inside 24 to 48 hours — the same figure a visit would produce, and we do not revise it afterwards. Against a full gut renovation, either service typically lands at a third to a half of the cost, for the part of the kitchen that was actually the problem.