Door Painting in Toronto — Off the Hinges and Lying Flat
A door painted upright fights gravity for four hours. A door painted flat does not fight anything, which is why every door we finish comes off first.
Horizontal
Every door, every coat
Both faces
And all four edges, including the top
5 years
On the finish and the workmanship
5.0
Rated on Google
Why horizontal changes the result
Paint is a liquid for several hours after it leaves the gun, and for all of those hours gravity is acting on it.
On a vertical surface the film wants to move downward. A coating heavy enough to level out properly is heavy enough to sag, and a coating light enough not to sag is too thin to level — which is why a brushed vertical door tends to show either runs at the bottom rail or brush texture across the whole face, and frequently both.
Lay the same door flat and the argument disappears. The film can be applied at the thickness that flows out best, because nothing is pulling it sideways. Surface tension does the rest, drawing the coating level while it is still open. The finished face has no direction in it at all.
This is most of why doors leave the house. Not because a booth is glamorous, but because there is nowhere in an occupied kitchen to lay thirty doors flat, leave them undisturbed for hours, and keep dust off them while they cure.
The edges nobody sees and everybody feels
A door has six surfaces and most quotes are written as though it has two.
Both faces, obviously. Then the two long edges — the hinge edge and the lock edge — which are visible every time the door is open and which take the most contact of any part of it. Then the top edge, which nobody looks at, and the bottom edge, which nobody can.
The top and bottom are worth spending a sentence on because skipping them is the most common shortcut in door painting and it has a real consequence. Bare timber at the top of a door is an open path for moisture, and in a bathroom or a kitchen that is where a door starts to swell and eventually to bind against its frame. Sealing all six surfaces is not a finishing detail, it is what stops a door changing shape through a Toronto winter.
Every door we spray gets all six. It is not a line item and it is not optional.
Cabinet doors, interior doors and front doors are three different jobs
They go through the same booth and they are not the same work.
A cabinet door is small, flat or panelled, and there are a lot of them. The challenge is consistency — thirty doors that have to look like one kitchen rather than thirty separately good doors. They are sprayed in one session, from one batch, racked in the order they came off, and labelled so each returns to the opening it was measured in.
An interior door is large, usually hollow-core or a moulded panel, and it is mostly about the leaf staying flat. A hollow-core door sprayed heavily on one face and lightly on the other will bow, so both faces get the same treatment on the same day even if only one side is changing colour.
A front door is the hardest of the three and the one people underestimate. It faces weather on one side and a heated house on the other, it moves seasonally, and the finish has to be flexible enough to accept that. It also has to come off, which means the opening is boarded while it is away — so it gets scheduled around weather rather than squeezed in.
What happens to the hardware
Everything comes off. Hinges, handles, latches, letter plates, cabinet knobs, the lot.
The alternative is masking, and masked hardware produces a paint edge at the tape line that chips the first time anything moves against it. On a hinge that is immediate, because the leaf pivots against the paint from day one.
While the hardware is off it gets assessed rather than just cleaned. Cabinet hinges from the eighties are usually worn at the pin and are the reason the doors no longer line up, and replacing them while everything is apart costs a fraction of doing it later. Interior door hinges are often painted over several times from previous decorating and are worth stripping or replacing outright.
Rehanging is where a door job is won or lost. A door that has been off is a door that has to be reset — shims adjusted, hinges packed, the closing edge eased where two coats have taken up the clearance. That is patient work and it is the part that decides whether the finished door feels right every day or catches slightly for the next ten years.
What we will and will not paint
Solid timber, engineered timber, MDF and primed hardboard all take a sprayed finish well and are normal work.
Thermofoil we quote conditionally, and the condition is whether the film is still bonded. A thermofoil door that is intact can be prepared and sprayed and it holds. A thermofoil door already lifting at the corner nearest a heat source will keep lifting, because the failure is the adhesive underneath and paint on top does not reach it. We look at photographs of the corners before answering.
Metal doors and metal-clad exterior doors we do, with the appropriate primer, and they behave well.
Glass panels are masked properly rather than scraped afterwards, which is slower and does not leave the fine scratches that scraping leaves in old glass.
What we decline is a door with a failed substrate — a delaminated skin, a swollen bottom rail, a hollow core that has been kicked through. Those are replacements rather than refinishes and painting one is money spent to make a broken door glossy.
Doors are the reason the booth exists
Door painting is not a side service here, it is the centre of the trade. A cabinet kitchen is thirty doors and drawer fronts, and everything about the booth, the racking and the schedule was built around finishing exactly that object well. Interior and front doors go through the same process because they are the same problem. Reading what the spray equipment is really for explains the equipment before the price.
Door Painting Cost in Toronto
Doors are priced per door and per face, plus the labour around them: removal, hardware, rehanging and adjustment.
Per face matters because a door where only one side changes colour is genuinely less work than one where both do — though on a hollow-core door we will usually recommend doing both anyway to keep the leaf flat, and we explain that rather than quietly charging for it.
The variables that move the number are the profile and the condition. A flat slab door sprays quickly. A six-panel moulded door has considerably more surface and several corners where old finish has built up. A door that has been painted five times and has lost its detail needs that build-up dealt with first, and that is its own line rather than a surprise.
Batching helps and it is worth asking about. Doing every interior door in a house at once is meaningfully cheaper per door than doing four now and four next year, because the setup, the transport and the booth session are shared.
Written price inside 24 to 48 hours from photographs, itemised, and it does not change once the work starts. Cash, debit, credit and Visa.
Questions
Common questions about door painting in Toronto
- Do I lose the doors off my rooms while this happens?
- For a few days, yes, and it is worth planning around. Bedroom and bathroom doors are usually done in batches rather than all at once so the house stays livable, and we hang temporary sheeting on a bathroom if you want it. Cabinet doors are different — open shelving for a fortnight bothers almost nobody.
- Can you paint a front door in winter?
- The door itself, yes, because it is sprayed indoors at the shop. The gap is the problem rather than the paint — the opening has to be boarded while the door is away, and in January most people would rather wait for spring. We say so instead of booking it and leaving you with plywood.
- What about the hinges and the handles?
- Off, every time, and never masked. A masked hinge leaves a paint edge that chips the first time the door swings. Hardware comes off, gets cleaned or replaced, and goes back on once the finish has cured. Rehanging a door is an adjustment job, not just a matter of driving screws back in.
- Will the door still shut afterwards?
- Yes, and we check it rather than assuming. Two coats of any finish add thickness to the edges, and on a door already tight in its frame that is enough to bind. Edges are eased where needed before the door goes back, which is a five-minute job at our end and a permanent irritation if skipped.
- Can you match the doors you spray to trim I am not changing?
- Usually, and it is worth doing carefully. The trim is matched from a physical sample cut or scraped from the actual moulding, not from a colour name, because a white that was mixed in 1998 has since yellowed and no current chip matches it. We match what is there now.
Doors that let the rest of the house down?
Photograph each door you want done, straight on, plus the trim around it if it is staying. The written price comes back inside 24 hours and covers removal, spraying, rehanging and the adjustment afterwards.
Free in-home consultation · no obligation