A factory-sprayed painted MDF door gives a harder, more even finish that holds up to Vancouver's damp better than paint brushed onto your existing doors in the kitchen. Site-brushed refinishing costs less and keeps the doors you have, but it shows brush texture, cures slowly, and chips sooner on the edges. Sprayed belongs on a new kitchen or a door replacement. Brushed belongs on doors that are sound when the budget or the calendar rules out new ones.
The door starts as a slab of MDF, or an MDF blank with a shaker profile routed into it. MDF is chosen on purpose: it has no grain and no joints, so it does not move with the seasons and the paint does not crack along a rail or a stile the way it does on a solid wood door. The blank is sealed, primed, sanded, and sprayed in a booth with a catalyzed finish that cures hard. The result is the finish you see on DADO's painted kitchens, a slab in decorators white for example, with no brush marks and the same sheen on door thirty as on door one.
A painter takes the doors off, or leaves them on, degreases them, sands to give the primer something to grip, primes, and brushes or rolls two coats. Each coat needs to cure before the next, and in a Vancouver October that is a day or two per coat. The work happens in your home or garage, with the smell and the dust that come with it. On a solid wood door the paint goes on well but will hairline at the joints within a couple of winters, because the wood keeps moving and the paint does not. On an old thermofoil or laminate door, adhesion is the problem and the finish can peel at the edges no matter how good the painter is.
Edges are where any painted door fails first. A sprayed finish wraps the edge and cures as one film, which is why it takes longer to chip. A brushed finish is thinner at the edge because that is where the brush lifts off. When a sprayed door does chip, the honest fix is a new door: it is built to the same size, sprayed in the same colour, and swapped in twenty minutes. When a brushed door chips, you touch it up from the same can and the patch shows a little, which most people accept for the price.
Sprayed doors hold a consistent sheen, usually matte to satin, across the whole kitchen because the finish went on in one controlled session. Brushed sheen drifts from door to door depending on how thick each coat went on and how long it cured. Humidity matters for both. Vancouver kitchens see steam from the dishwasher and the range every day, with wet winters behind that. A cured catalyzed finish on MDF is not bothered by it. A brushed latex or alkyd on wood softens slightly when it is warm and damp, and the doors nearest the dishwasher wear first.
Choose sprayed if you are building a new kitchen, or if your boxes are sound and you are replacing the doors and drawer fronts. New painted slab MDF fronts with fresh soft-close hardware change a kitchen more than most people expect, and the boxes never leave the wall. Choose brushed if your existing doors are solid wood or MDF in good shape, the layout is staying, and you need the change to cost the least it can. It is a real option with a real lifespan of a few years, not a permanent one.
We do not quote door replacement from a table, because the number depends on how many doors you have, the profile, and what the boxes look like when we open them. It is quoted per project after a look at the existing cabinets, and it is a fraction of the cost of a new kitchen. For the whole kitchen, a painted DADO kitchen in Vancouver runs from about $18,000 for a smaller kitchen to past $100,000 for a large high-end build, and most projects land between $30,000 and $50,000, with the finish as one of the main things that moves the number. Brushed refinishing is priced by the painter who does it, and it will come in lower than either.
Run your kitchen through the Vancouver Kitchen Cost Calculator to see what a painted finish does to the planning range, read what drives the cost of a kitchen up or down for the other levers, and book a free consultation to have us look at your doors and boxes before you choose.