Wood Painting in Vaughan — Everything That Is Not a Cabinet Door
The same booth, the same preparation and the same finish, applied to the woodwork people notice second and complain about first when it is done badly.
Same booth
Anything that comes off gets sprayed
2K or alkyd
Depending on what it is attached to
5 years
On the finish and the workmanship
4.9
Rated on Google
What falls into this
Everything in a house made of wood, painted, that is not a kitchen cabinet.
Interior doors, most often. Then trim — baseboards, casings, crown, window surrounds. Then the fixed pieces nobody thinks of as joinery until they look tired: mantels, banisters and newel posts, wainscot panelling, built-in bookcases, window seats, radiator covers. And loose furniture, occasionally, where somebody has a piece worth the money it costs to have it done properly.
The common thread is not material and it is not room. It is that these are surfaces people look at closely — a door you push open twice an hour, a banister your hand runs along — and the standard that applies to them is the cabinet standard rather than the wall standard.
What comes off, and what does not
The whole method turns on this question, and it is the first thing we work out.
Anything that can be removed gets sprayed. Interior doors come off their hinges. Removable shelving, loose furniture, mantel shelves where they lift, cabinet doors from a built-in — all of it goes to the shop, gets prepared and sprayed in the booth, and comes back. Filtered air, controlled conditions, no dust settling on a wet panel, and a finish with no direction in it.
Anything fixed gets brushed. Trim nailed to a wall, casings around a door opening, the carcass of a built-in — masking and spraying those in an occupied house means sealing a room off and containing solvent for days, for a surface that is not viewed at cabinet-door distance.
A typical job is both. The doors go away and the frames and casings are brushed in place, which is exactly the split a kitchen has.
Two products, and why it is not one
2K polyurethane is what everything sprayed gets — the same catalysed finish that goes onto cabinets, cross-linking into a film that resists knocks and cleaning and does not yellow.
It cannot be brushed. That is not a preference, it is a property: it is formulated to atomise, it flashes off too fast to keep a wet edge by hand, and the health precautions it needs are not compatible with someone standing over it with a brush in a family home.
So brushed work gets a waterborne alkyd instead — a product that behaves like an oil paint under the brush and cures hard without the solvent load. On trim, viewed at the distance trim is viewed, it is the right answer rather than the fallback one.
We will name the brands we use for it if you ask. There is nothing proprietary about that half of the job and no reason to be coy.
Preparation on old woodwork
Trim in a house of any age has usually been painted before, sometimes several times, and what is under the top coat decides everything.
Old stained and varnished trim is the difficult case. The sealer under the stain is frequently something modern paint will not bond to, and a light sand does not change that. It needs degreasing and then a bonding primer chosen for the substrate — and most of the failed trim jobs we fix skipped exactly that step, which is why they peel in sheets at the corners rather than wearing.
Filled nail holes, opened joints and split casings are made good before anything goes on. Knots in softwood get sealed, or they will bleed through a pale colour within a year however many coats are over them.
None of this is visible in a photograph of the finished job, and all of it is why one quote is higher than another.
The pieces people forget to ask about
Three come up on nearly every job, and all three are cheap to include and awkward to add later.
Door edges and tops. A door painted in place has its hinge edge left as it was and its top edge skipped entirely, because neither is visible standing in the room. Both are visible the moment the door swings, and the top edge is where dust settles and shows. A door sprayed off its hinges gets all six faces.
The inside of a built-in. Bookcases and window seats are usually painted on their fronts and left inside, which is defensible until you put pale books against a yellowed interior. It costs little while the piece is already stripped and masked.
Banister spindles. They are slow — thirty or forty individually turned pieces, each needing to be reached from every angle — and quoting a staircase without counting them is how a job goes wrong for whoever quoted it. We count them.
None of this is upselling. It is the difference between a room that looks finished and one that looks finished from one particular position.
Wood Painting Cost in Vaughan
Woodwork is quoted by the item and by the day: doors and removable pieces counted individually, fixed trim estimated by the run and the number of days on site.
Condition drives it more than quantity. A house with sound, previously painted trim is straightforward. A house with old varnished trim being taken to white is a different job with a bonding primer in it, and the price reflects the preparation rather than the paint.
The split between sprayed and brushed changes the number too, because spraying means transport and booth time and brushing does not. We set out which items fall where in the quote itself, rather than leaving it as a surprise.
One thing worth knowing before comparing quotes: a price per door with no mention of what happens to the edges, or a price for trim with no mention of the primer, is not a lower quote for the same work. It is a quote for different work. The difference will not be visible for a year and then it will be visible permanently, which is the whole reason we set out the preparation in writing rather than leaving it as something you find out afterwards.
Where woodwork is quoted alongside a kitchen, it is cheaper than having it done separately — the containment is already up and the crew is already there, and that saving is passed on rather than absorbed.
Woodwork is one of four things through this booth
Cabinets are the bulk of the work and this is the rest of it — doors, trim, mantels, built-ins and furniture. The division between the four is not really about material; it is about what is being finished and whether it can leave the house. Seeing how the four services divide up is the quickest way to work out which one your job is, and several jobs turn out to be two of them at once.
Questions
Common questions about wood painting in Vaughan
- Can you spray my interior doors?
- Yes, and they come off their hinges to have it done, the same as cabinet doors. A door sprayed off its hinges in a booth and rehung is a completely different object from one painted in place with the hinges masked — the edges are the tell, and edges are what your hand meets.
- What about trim that cannot come off?
- Brushed, in a waterborne alkyd rather than 2K. That is not a compromise on quality, it is the correct product — 2K cannot be brushed at all, and trim fixed to a wall in an occupied house cannot sensibly be masked and sprayed. We are happy to name the products we use for it.
- Do you paint stained trim white?
- Regularly, and it is the most common request in this category. Old stained trim is usually sealed with something that paint will not bond to, so it needs degreasing and a bonding primer rather than a light sand — most of the failures we are called in to fix are trim jobs that skipped that.
- Can you match the cabinets?
- Yes, and it is worth doing when both are in the same sightline. The finish is tinted, so a door and a cabinet can be exactly the same colour rather than close. Where the two are in different rooms, matching is usually unnecessary and costs the same either way.
- Is this cheaper than cabinet work?
- Per item, yes, because most woodwork is simpler than a cabinet door and there is less of it. Per day on site it is much the same, since the preparation is the same and the preparation is the cost.
Have woodwork that lets the rest of the house down?
Photographs of what you want done come back with a written price inside 24 hours, which does not change afterwards. If part of the job wants brushing rather than spraying, the quote says which part and why.
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