About Lacosapreziosa

We Work in Kitchens Where the Fridge Blocks the Drawer

Lacosapreziosa paints cabinets in Santa Monica. We are based on Wilshire Blvd in the 90405 area, and the kitchens we work in are mostly small: galley runs, a single wall with a peninsula, the tight L in a nineteen fifties apartment where opening the dishwasher closes off the room. That is not a limitation we apologize for. It is the work, and doing it well in a small space is a different skill from doing it in a house with a butler’s pantry to stage in.

A cabinet job is really a logistics job wearing a painter’s coveralls. Twenty odd doors and fronts have to leave your kitchen, get degreased, filled, primed, sanded, sprayed three times and cured, and come back on the correct hinges in the correct openings, while you keep feeding people from the same room. Get the sequence right and it is a calm week. Get it wrong and it is a month of a family eating standing up.

Why We Talk About Grease and Cure Before Color

Every cabinet failure we have been called out to fix falls into one of two buckets. Either the faces were not clean before they were abraded, so the finish was bonded to a film of cooking oil rather than to the door, or the finish was loaded into service before it had hardened. Neither has anything to do with which enamel was used, and both are entirely a matter of the painter being willing to wait.

So we degrease, rinse and dry before sanding. We name the primer on the written scope, because a bonding primer over sound varnish and a shellac primer over bleeding tannin are not interchangeable and the difference is invisible until it is not. We spray thin and often rather than thick and once. And we tell you the honest week when you can put a stack of plates against a lower door, which is usually later than you were hoping.

What We Do Not Do

We do not spray inside occupied homes. We do not paint over lifting thermofoil and call it refinished. We do not quote a cabinet job over a photograph, because the photograph cannot tell us whether the faces are wood, veneer or foil, and that single fact moves the price and sometimes moves the answer to no. We will tell you when a kitchen is past repainting. It happens a few times a year and it costs you nothing to hear it.

Getting Started

Call (424) 673-5861 or come by 783 Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90405. The walkthrough is free and takes about twenty minutes: we open a few doors, count the openings, check the substrate and the hinge type, and leave you with a written scope naming the products and the start date.