Hollywood Refinishing does kitchen cabinet refinishing and refacing across Glendale — the Period Revival streets of Rossmoyne and Royal Boulevard, the hillside houses in Glenoaks Canyon and Chevy Chase Canyon, and the condo and apartment kitchens on the flats around Brand Boulevard. Our shop is on Sherman Way in North Hollywood, just west of the city, so doors and drawer fronts are sprayed under controlled conditions and come back finished.
Glendale suits this work for one plain reason: the housing is old and it was built well. Of the city’s 75,907 housing units, 51,083 — just over two thirds — went up before 1980, and the largest single group, 15,183 units or one in five, dates to 1939 or earlier. In a kitchen that age, the thing that has failed is almost never the cabinet box. It is the finish, the hinges, and forty years of somebody else’s paint.
Below is what we find in Glendale houses, how a cabinet refinishing job is sequenced, and when we tell people to spend the money elsewhere. Hollywood Refinishing works under California contractor licence CSLB #818749.
Pull the doors off a kitchen in Rossmoyne or Ard Eevin Highlands and you will usually find face-frame cabinetry in solid lumber, built in place and scribed to plaster walls that are nowhere near square. That is the whole argument for refinishing: the boxes are not going to fail. They were overbuilt by people who assumed the house would outlive them, and in Glendale it has.
The real cost of replacing them is not the cabinets, it is everything that comes out with them. Site-built cabinetry is fastened into lath and plaster, tied into the tile backsplash, and often carrying the countertop. Demolition means plaster repair, new tile, and a scribe-and-shim exercise against walls no flat-pack box will sit flush against. Refinishing sidesteps it — the layout stays, the walls stay closed. If the boxes are sound but the doors are wrong for the house, cabinet refacing changes the visible surfaces without touching structure. Either route sits inside a kitchen refinishing scope, not a remodel.
The EPA’s Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule requires anyone paid to perform work that disturbs painted surfaces in housing built before 1978 to be certified, and their employees trained, in lead-safe work practices. The carve-out is for minor repair and maintenance — work disrupting six square feet or less of interior painted surface per room. A kitchen full of painted cabinets is nowhere near that threshold. Nor is this an edge case here: 41,173 of Glendale’s 75,907 housing units — over half — predate 1970, well inside the pre-1978 line.
Ask any contractor, us included, how they intend to handle it before work starts: what leaves the house, what gets contained, and whether original painted frames will be dry-sanded in an occupied kitchen. The answer to that last one should be no. Doors and drawer fronts come off and go to the shop; in-place frame work is a containment job, not an orbital sander and an open window.
1920s to 1940s Period Revival. Rossmoyne is the city’s largest historic district at 503 homes, developed by the Haddock-Nibley Company from 1923 and largely built out by 1950 in Spanish Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival and French-inspired designs. Royal Boulevard adds thirty more, built primarily between 1927 and 1948; Ard Eevin Highlands, 87 homes in the Cumberland Heights neighbourhood; Cottage Grove, 14 homes on a single block at the foot of Adams Hill, given a uniform cottage typology and Tudor Revival styling. Expect solid-stock doors under several generations of enamel, hinges mortised into the face frame, and doors painted shut, forced, and rehung out of square. The original hardware is usually worth saving and almost always gets thrown out.
1950s and 1960s. Those two decades added 20,851 units between them, and they produce the best refinishing candidates in the city: flat-slab birch and mahogany on plywood boxes. The veneer is thick enough to take a real sanding, and a stripped and restained slab door beats anything comparable you can order. Ard Eevin Highlands carries some of this era too, in the later Minimal Traditional and Ranch houses mixed among its Period Revivals. Stained work belongs with wood refinishing and staining.
1970s and 1980s. The 1980s were Glendale’s single biggest decade for housebuilding — 12,649 units, more than any other decade the census counts. What we mostly open up from those years is stained oak raised-panel, and some thermofoil. Oak takes a modern opaque finish well, but the grain telegraphs through unless it is filled first — anyone who says otherwise has not gone back to look a year later.
Glendale has nine designated historic districts — Ard Eevin Highlands, Brockmont Park, Casa Verdugo, Cottage Grove, Niodrara Drive, North Cumberland Heights, Rossmoyne, Royal Boulevard and South Cumberland Heights — plus a proposed Verdugo Woodlands district and a pending Cleveland Knoll district. The Glendale Register of Historic Resources separately contains over 100 properties, and the City states that once a property is on the Register, proposed alterations, repairs and demolitions must be approved by the Community Development Department and/or the Historic Preservation Commission. Inside a district, the City says the Historic Preservation Commission reviews an owner’s proposal instead of the Design Review Board. We are finish contractors, not your planner: if your house is on the Register, in a district, or under a Mills Act contract, confirm your scope with the City of Glendale’s Historic Preservation Planner at (818) 548-2140 before anything is ordered or removed.
The other Glendale reality is access. Chevy Chase Canyon, Glenoaks Canyon and Adams Hill are hillside neighbourhoods — narrow, curving streets, short driveways, often a flight of steps from the kerb to the door. That matters because every door, drawer front and shelf leaves the house and comes back, so tell us the street when you call.
The sequence is unglamorous. We check three things: how the boxes are built, what the doors are made of under the finish, and whether the existing coating will bond or has to come off. Doors, drawer fronts and hardware come off and get labelled to their openings, because in a house from the 1930s no two openings are identical. Frames are prepped and coated in place with the room contained, doors are sprayed at the shop and brought back, then reinstalled and adjusted until the reveals are even — on an old face frame that is most of the skill.
Here is the part most pages leave out: there are Glendale kitchens we will not refinish. Particle-board boxes swollen under a long-running sink leak will not hold a finish or a screw, and a good topcoat on them is money thrown away; if a leak is what got you here, handle that first through water damage restoration. Delaminated thermofoil is a replacement, not a refinish. And if you are moving the sink, changing the layout, or the run is too short for the appliance you want, you need cabinets rather than a finish. Better said at the estimate than after a deposit.
New finishes are ruthless about their neighbours. Tile counters with dark grout, or laminate from a previous owner’s update, will date the whole kitchen the day the doors go back on, which is why countertop refinishing often happens in the same visit. Plenty of the city’s pre-1940 houses — the largest single slice of Glendale’s housing stock — also have original oak strip flooring under carpet or sheet vinyl laid over it decades ago; once uncovered, hardwood floor refinishing gives you the original material back.
Bathrooms are the same argument one room over. Two in five Glendale housing units, 30,220 of them, were built before 1960, which is why so many bathrooms here still have their original cast-iron tub and small square wall tile in the period colours. Those tubs are better than most of what replaces them, and pulling one out of a 1920s bathroom takes the tile and often the plaster with it. Bathtub, tile and shower reglazing keeps the fixture and changes the colour instead. The full list is on our services page. For a free estimate in Glendale, call (818) 988-4240 — Hollywood Refinishing is 4.9-star rated on Yelp and 5.0 on Google.
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.
Two questions decide it: are the boxes sound, and do you still want these doors? If both are yes, refinish — you keep the original doors, which in a 1920s or mid-century Glendale house are usually better made than their replacements. If the boxes are sound but the doors are wrong for the house, refacing changes the doors, drawer fronts and visible face-frame surfaces without opening the walls. If the layout itself is the problem, neither is the answer and we will say so.
We will not answer that for you, and be wary of any contractor who does. Glendale has nine designated historic districts, and the City states that inside a district the Historic Preservation Commission reviews an owner's proposal instead of the Design Review Board; for properties on the Glendale Register, proposed alterations, repairs and demolitions must be approved by the Community Development Department and/or the Historic Preservation Commission. Confirm your specific scope with the City of Glendale's Historic Preservation Planner at (818) 548-2140 before work is scheduled.
It is the main thing to sort out before anyone sands anything. The EPA's Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule applies to paid work disturbing painted surfaces in housing built before 1978, and its minor repair carve-out covers only work disrupting six square feet or less of interior painted surface per room — a kitchen is well past that. Ask whoever you hire how the prep will be contained and what leaves the house rather than being sanded in place.
You keep the sink, the appliances and the floor. What you lose is door and drawer access while the frames are being prepped and coated, since the doors and drawer fronts are off at the shop. Most people move everyday plates and glasses onto the counter for the duration. We give you the schedule for your specific kitchen at the estimate rather than a stock number.
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13151 Sherman Way Unit G-H North Hollywood, CA 91605
818-988-4240