Kitchen cabinet refinishing in Sherman Oaks is mostly a question of what is already behind the doors. Most of the kitchens we open here were framed out of solid lumber and real plywood, in houses built while the Valley was still being subdivided. That construction is worth keeping; the finish, the hardware and often the door profile are not.
Our shop is on Sherman Way in North Hollywood. Sherman Oaks is not one kind of housing: it runs from the Los Angeles River, which forms part of its northern boundary, up into the hills toward Mulholland, across ZIP codes 91401, 91403 and 91423. A flat-lot ranch in Chandler Estates, a Ventura Boulevard condo and a hillside house off Valley Vista are three different jobs.
Gen. Moses Hazeltine Sherman, a partner in the Los Angeles Suburban Homes Company, developed Sherman Oaks out of a thousand acres the company subdivided; the land was selling by 1927. Little of that first wave survives, and what stands now is largely a postwar build-out – good news for anyone weighing cabinet refinishing. Cabinets of that period are face-frame boxes in solid stock and real plywood, scribed to a plaster jamb, and nearly always worth saving.
The name that comes up most on estimates here is William Mellenthin, who built more than 3,000 homes in Southern California from the 1920s to the 1960s and in 1951 bought the twelve-and-a-half-acre Sherman Oaks estate of actor Buck Jones. His “birdhouse ranches” carry a cupola on the roof, diamond-pane windows and a Dutch door – and inside, wood-beamed ceilings, paneling and built-in cabinets and bookcases. Those built-ins are the argument for refinishing rather than ripping out: under decades of ambered lacquer the wood is usually clean.
The flats north of the boulevard behave differently. Chandler Estates – six square blocks centered on Chandler Boulevard just north of the Ventura Freeway, petitioned into Sherman Oaks in 1991 – and Magnolia Woods, a forty-five-block area that followed weeks later, are largely houses built from the 1950s onward and often remodeled once already. That second-generation cabinetry is another animal: particleboard boxes, oak raised-panel doors, sometimes thermofoil. Those are refacing kitchens. Up in Longridge Estates, Royal Woods and the streets off Valley Vista, the custom hillside houses run to flush-overlay slab doors.
Refinish when the boxes are solid, the doors are real wood and still flat, and the layout works. Strip or sand to bare, repair the burn-through around the pulls, re-glue loose joints, prime and spray. You keep the original doors – on a Mellenthin built-in that is the whole point.
Reface when the boxes are sound but the doors are the problem: warped, delaminating, or a raised-panel oak profile nobody wants. New doors and fronts, new veneer over the face frames, new hinges and pulls; footprint, plumbing and counters stay. That is the call for most eighties- and nineties-era kitchens.
Don’t bother in a few cases, and we would rather say so on the estimate than halfway through. Thermofoil doors are a vinyl film laminated to an MDF core; once the film lifts and the core swells there is nothing flat to sand and nothing sound to bond to. Same for a sink base gone soft – a water problem, not a finish problem, and one for water damage restoration first. And if the layout itself is wrong, refinishing the cabinets just gets you a shiny bad kitchen; that is a kitchen refinishing conversation instead.
Doors, fronts and hardware come off first, tagged by opening, and go to the shop to be sprayed flat – spraying horizontal is the difference between a finish that lays down and a run at the bottom rail. Boxes and face frames are done in place behind containment.
Where you live changes the logistics. South of Ventura Boulevard the lanes climb, and Los Angeles has a classification for the narrowest of them: a substandard hillside limited street, improved to a roadway width of less than twenty feet. Nothing large parks outside for the day on one of those. Along the Ventura and Riverside corridors the constraint is the building instead – elevator bookings, work-hour windows, and shared ventilation that rules out spraying inside a unit.
One local quirk: the Valley ranch plan opens the kitchen straight into a den with no door between, and Mellenthin’s plans do it constantly. There is no shutting the work off from the rest of the house, so dust extraction is not optional.
Sherman Oaks is a renter’s neighborhood as much as an owner’s – at the 2000 census renters occupied 58.9% of the housing stock against 41.1% owner-occupied – and the multifamily stock along Riverside Drive and Ventura Boulevard is largely mid-century. Chase Knolls at 13411 Riverside Drive is the landmark case: 260 original units on thirteen acres, built 1947-1949 to designs by Heth Wharton and Ralph Vaughn, and a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.
For property managers that combination is the job: cabinets refinished or refaced while the tub, surround tile and vanity top are reglazed on the same turn, so a unit comes back renewed without a dumpster in the carport. Bathtub and tile reglazing is the highest-leverage move on a dated bathroom here – the pink or seafoam fifties wall tile everyone assumes must be demolished can be recoated in place.
Cabinets are rarely the only tired surface in a house this age. Countertop refinishing seals a laminate or tile counter with grout you have stopped scrubbing, without disturbing the sink. Plenty of Sherman Oaks ranches still have original oak strip flooring carpeted over decades ago – hardwood floor refinishing generally beats a floating floor laid on top.
Then there is everything that is not a cabinet: beamed ceilings, paneling, built-in bookcases, the Dutch door. Wood refinishing and staining covers those; matching a repaired built-in to a refinished kitchen is easier when one shop does both. The full list is on our services page. Hollywood Refinishing holds California contractor license CSLB #818749, and is 4.9-star rated on Yelp and 5.0 on Google. Get in touch and we will tell you plainly whether it is a refinish, a reface, or something we would talk you out of.
Hollywood Refinishing is a licensed California contractor, CSLB #818749, working out of 13151 Sherman Way, Unit G-H, North Hollywood. Refinishing is the whole business, not a sideline — cabinets, bathtubs, tile, floors, countertops and furniture. We are 4.9-star rated on Yelp and 5.0 on Google, every estimate is free and on site, and we will tell you when a surface is past refinishing rather than sell you a finish that will not hold.
They can almost always be refinished. The orange, yellowed look is usually the old lacquer, not the wood. Sanded to bare and re-stained, pine reads far cooler than owners expect - but it is soft and blotchy, so it needs a conditioner before stain.
Almost certainly not. That is thermofoil - a vinyl film laminated over an MDF core. Once the film lifts the core swells, leaving nothing flat to sand and nothing sound to bond to. The boxes behind are usually fine, so it is a strong refacing candidate.
No, but it changes how the job runs. Los Angeles classifies its narrowest hillside lanes as substandard hillside limited streets, improved to under twenty feet of roadway. We stage a smaller vehicle and run doors to the shop in loads.
Yes - a common pairing in the mid-century buildings along Riverside and Ventura. Cabinets are refinished or refaced while the tub, surround tile and vanity top are reglazed, with no demolition and no plumbing changes. Send the building constraints up front: work-hour windows, elevator booking, shared return air.
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13151 Sherman Way Unit G-H North Hollywood, CA 91605
818-988-4240