Two weeks is enough for a refresh if your cabinet boxes are sound: new doors and drawer fronts, new hardware, and often a counter swap. It is not enough for a new custom kitchen. DADO builds cabinetry to order on a standard lead time of about four weeks from approved drawings, and installation comes after that. The honest version of a two-week refresh is a kitchen that keeps its layout and its boxes and changes what you see and touch.
Hardware is the quickest change. Swapping pulls and knobs on thirty doors is a morning of work once the new hardware is on site, and if the new pulls use the same hole spacing you avoid filling and drilling.
New doors and drawer fronts fit if the boxes are square, dry and solidly fixed to the wall. DADO measures each opening, builds the fronts to those sizes in painted slab MDF, a shaker profile or a wood veneer, and fits them with new soft-close hinges and slides. The box stays, so there is no demolition, no plumbing and no electrical work. The kitchen is usable every evening.
Refinishing the doors you already have is the part of a refresh where two weeks gets tight. Each coat needs cure time before the next, and Vancouver humidity stretches that. Get the schedule in days, not in promises, before you count on it.
A new quartz counter is templated after the cabinet fronts are decided, then cut at the fabricator's shop, then installed. Fabrication commonly takes one to two weeks after template, and the sink is out of service on install day while a plumber disconnects and reconnects it. If you want the counter inside the same two weeks, book the template on day one and accept that the counter may land a few days after the doors. If the fabricator's queue is long, it will not fit, and it is better to know that up front than to live with a plywood counter for three weeks.
A new layout does not. Moving the sink, the range or the fridge means plumbing, gas or electrical work by licensed trades, and often a permit. DADO coordinates the sequence with your contractor, but the trades and the permit office run on their own calendars.
New boxes do not. A full custom kitchen is built to order, and DADO's standard lead time is about four weeks from the day the drawings are signed off. Add the site measure before that and the install after it, and a full kitchen is a five to seven week project in practice, not two. A promise of a fully custom kitchen in two weeks usually means stock cabinets or a date that will move.
Taking cabinets to the ceiling usually does not fit either. If your uppers stop at a bulkhead, opening that bulkhead is drywall, sometimes ductwork, and paint. It is a good change, but it turns a refresh into a small renovation.
Before the clock starts, DADO looks at the existing boxes, measures every opening, and you choose the door style, finish and hardware at the Kitsilano showroom. That visit is what makes the two weeks possible. Once fronts are in production, the counter template is booked. Days one to three are hardware, or doors and hardware together if the fronts are ready. The counter follows when the fabricator delivers, with the plumber booked for the same day. The last day is adjustment: hinges tuned so every gap is even, drawers aligned, and a walk-through with you.
We do not publish a price for refresh work because it depends on the number of doors, the finish, and the condition of what is there. It is quoted per project after we look at the existing cabinets, and it costs a fraction of a new kitchen. For comparison, a new custom kitchen in Vancouver runs from about $18,000 for a smaller kitchen to past $100,000 for a large high-end build, with most projects landing between $30,000 and $50,000. If your boxes are sound and you like your layout, the refresh is usually the better use of the money. If the boxes are failing or the layout is wrong, the refresh is money spent twice.
Run your kitchen through the Vancouver Kitchen Cost Calculator to see the planning range for a new kitchen, read how long a custom kitchen takes if you are weighing the full project, and book a free consultation to have us look at your boxes and tell you which route makes sense.