Choosing kitchen spraying or other fitted joinery

Same idea, different rooms, different films

Both pages are about coating fitted woodwork instead of replacing it. They are not the same specification. A kitchen is grease, heat, worktops that stay in the room, and doors that are usually MDF, foil or a shaker profile. A bathroom vanity is steam and cleaners. A wardrobe is a large flat face and a hinge that must still close on clothes. A bookcase is shelves, open edges and a sheen people will judge at eye level. Cabinet refinishing covers the vanity, the wardrobe, the bookcase and the study joinery. Kitchen cabinet spraying and hand painting covers the kitchen. If a quotation uses one price for all of them, it has not looked at the film each room attacks.

Kitchens split again, by how the door was made. Contemporary MDF and smooth shaker doors are taken off and sprayed, because a brush mark on a flat factory door is the thing you will see. In-frame and solid-timber kitchens, including those associated with makers already named on the kitchen page, are often hand painted so the moulding keeps its section. That choice is made before the doors leave the room. It changes the time on site and the place where the film is formed. Cabinet refinishing makes the same spray-or-brush decision, but from the piece in front of the surveyor: a traditional vanity may want a brush, a flat wardrobe door may want spray. Neither decision is copied across from the kitchen automatically.

Replacement is a different project. The kitchen page publishes a guide band for coating the existing doors and sets it beside the cost of replacing a kitchen of a similar size, using the figures this site already states. Cabinet refinishing does not borrow that kitchen band. A tired wardrobe is not a kitchen, and a swollen foil door or a failed edge may be a joinery repair rather than a coating. The survey says which.

What has to be true before a coating is honest

The boxes need to be sound. Coating does not tighten a hinge plate that has pulled out of chipboard, reseal a worktop, or put right a vanity carcase that has swollen under a drip. Doors and drawer fronts come off so the edge and the hinge side are coated, and they are labelled so they return to their own opening. Worktops, appliances and splashbacks in a kitchen are masked and left. In a bathroom the silicone line is noted if it has failed, because paint will not reseal it. Shelves in a bookcase are listed if they are in the scope. Interiors of boxes stay uncoated unless there is a reason to include them.

Existing films matter. A melamine or foil that is sound can take a coating after the right preparation. A film that is lifting at the edge is a different conversation. Grease in a kitchen and soap in a bathroom both stop a new film bonding if they are still on the surface. Open-grained oak or ash, more common on a bookcase or a study fitting than on a modern kitchen door, needs the grain filled or the pores show through. Colour is sampled in the room, under the lamp that is actually there. A kitchen lamp and a bathroom lamp are rarely the same colour temperature, which is why a shared hue can still look like two different paints.

Cure is part of the handover. Handles and hinges go back when the product says the film can take them, not when the face feels dry to a fingertip. A care note for the kitchen is about wiping grease without a scouring cream. A care note for a vanity is about steam and the cleaners already in that room. Those notes are not interchangeable, which is another reason the pages are separate.

Which page to read

If the doors are on kitchen units, open kitchen cabinet spraying and hand painting. You will see the spray path, the hand-painted path, the guide band and the comparison with replacement. If the piece is a vanity, a wardrobe, a bookcase or study joinery, open cabinet refinishing. You will see how those pieces are labelled, coated and handed back without a kitchen price attached. A house that needs both should expect two lines on the quotation. Room painting, wallpaper and specialist wall finishes are the room decoration hub. They are not a substitute for a door that has to be taken off and finished as furniture.