Cabinet Repair & Adjustment on San Juan Island

A kitchen where every door hangs slightly crooked, two drawers stick, and three pulls are loose reads as a kitchen that needs replacing. It usually isn’t. Cabinet boxes outlast their hardware by decades, and hardware is cheap, available, and adjustable. This is one of the highest-value half days you can buy for a house.

The most common thing I fix is door alignment. Almost every cabinet built since the 1980s uses a European cup hinge with three-way adjustment — in and out, side to side, up and down — and almost nobody knows the screws are there. A row of doors that no longer lines up can often be brought back into a straight reveal in twenty minutes with a screwdriver, no parts at all. When the hinge itself is finished, they are a standard part and swap directly.

The second is stripped screws in particleboard. This is the failure mode of nearly every mid-range cabinet, and it is why a door starts sagging and then falls off its top hinge. Driving a bigger screw into the same hole works for about a year. What actually works is filling the hole with glue and a hardwood dowel or plug, letting it cure, and re-drilling clean. That one detail is the difference between a repair and a delay.

Drawer slides are third. A lot of island kitchens from the 1990s use epoxy-coated bottom-mount roller slides, which wear out, bind, and drop the drawer front. Those can usually be upgraded to full-extension ball-bearing slides, which is a noticeably better drawer than the house came with, at a parts cost of not much. Soft-close retrofits are available for both hinges and slides, and for a rental they solve the slamming problem permanently.

Then there is what the island specifically does to cabinets. Two things. First, seasonal humidity swing: a house that runs damp all winter and dries out in August moves solid-wood doors and face frames enough that a door which closed fine in June binds at the top in February. The right answer is usually a hinge adjustment twice a year, not planing wood off a door, because planing is permanent and the swing is not. I will tell you which one yours needs. Second, salt air on hardware. Houses close to the water go through pulls, knobs, and hinges faster, and cheap plated hardware pits and stains within a few seasons. If your kitchen looks at water, solid stainless or solid brass hardware is worth the difference and I will say so.

Under-sink cabinets are their own category and worth being precise about. A swollen, delaminating cabinet floor under a kitchen or bath sink is one of the most common things I see, especially in second homes where a slow drip ran for months with nobody in the house. I replace cabinet bottoms, cleats, and the affected face frame or toe kick, and I seal or line the new floor so the next drip is visible instead of absorbed. What I do not do is the plumbing. I hold a Washington general contractor registration, not a plumbing license, so the leak itself gets fixed by a licensed plumber first — then I rebuild the cabinet. Same order every time, and it is not negotiable, because rebuilding a cabinet under an active leak is throwing away material.

Other things that come up regularly: melamine and plywood shelves that have sagged under dishes and need stiffening or replacing, cabinet boxes that have come apart at the corner and want to be glued and clamped rather than screwed harder, toe kicks damaged by a vacuum or by water, drawer boxes with failed bottoms, lazy susan hardware, and doors that have been painted so many times they no longer clear the frame. In vacation rentals, add the whole hardware set wearing out at once from turnover traffic, which is genuinely cheaper to replace in one visit than in six.

Refinishing is a fair question and here is the honest answer. Repainting cabinet doors and face frames in place gives a good result if the prep is right — degreasing, scuff sanding, a bonding primer, and a hard enamel — and I do that work as an interior painting job, brushed and rolled, not sprayed in a booth. Cabinet refacing with new veneer and doors, and full cabinet manufacture, are different trades and I will refer you rather than pretend.

One last practical note. Cabinet hardware is small, light, and easy to bring over, so this is a good job for an outer island or a ferry-island day. If I know your hinge type and slide length before the trip, I can arrive with the parts instead of discovering I need a boat ride to get them.