Local Handyman Service Close to You in Penge

Most tired kitchens in Penge do not need replacing. The carcasses screwed to the wall in a terraced SE20 kitchen are usually sound chipboard boxes that will outlast several sets of doors, and the things that actually look worn out — the fronts, the handles, the hinges — can be changed for a fraction of the disruption of a rip-out. Refacing is a precise job rather than a large one, and its difficulty is all in the setting out.

Measuring what is already there

New fronts have to match the existing carcass module, the overlay of door on box, and the hinge boring position. A technician records the door sizes, the hinge cup diameter and its distance from the door edge, the number of hinges per door, and whether the doors are half or full overlay. Gaps between doors in an existing run are also measured, because a manufacturer's standard clearance may not match what the original fitter allowed, and a set of fronts that is each a couple of millimetres generous will show as a hard rub by the end of a long run.

Boring for hinges without tearing the face

Cup holes are drilled with a forstner bit in a jig clamped to the door, with the door supported flat and the bit run at a slow speed. Speed is what tears a lacquered or foil-wrapped face; patience is what keeps the edge crisp. Depth is set on the machine rather than judged, because a cup broken through the front of a door is an unrecoverable mistake. Where doors arrive pre-bored, each one is still checked against the carcass before any hinge plate is fixed.

Handles and the tyranny of the run

Handle positions matter far more than their design. Along a bank of base units the eye reads the line of the handles as a single horizontal, and a millimetre of drift on each door accumulates into an obvious stagger by the fourth. The answer is one drilling template referenced from the same corner of every door, a backing block behind the face to stop break-out, and a trial fit of two adjacent doors before the rest are touched. Drawer fronts are set out from their own line rather than the door line, which is a decision to make deliberately.

What turns up behind the old fronts

Stripping a kitchen back regularly exposes the state of the cabinet under the sink, where a slow tap or waste leak will have swollen the base panel and left the back of the unit black. That needs dealing with before new fronts go on, and treatment of the affected surfaces falls to mould removal across Penge and nearby areas. Behind plinths, the strip of floor nobody has cleaned in a decade often tells its own story about what has been living under the units, which is where the pest control team in Penge becomes the more urgent call.

The parts of the job that are not joinery

Under-cabinet lighting, a new appliance circuit or moving a socket to suit a changed layout is not part of a refacing job, and that side is handled by electrical services team in Dulwich. Worktop replacement is a separate exercise again, since a new top rarely sits happily on old units without adjustment.

How a refacing booking works

Doors, hinges and handles are supplied by the customer in most cases, and they need to be on site, unwrapped and checked for transit damage before the technician arrives, since a single damaged front stops a run. The work is charged by time rather than by the door, and a small kitchen usually runs to a day with adjustment of every door at the end. Households in newer flats with shallower cabinets face a slightly different set of constraints, covered by Woolwich odd jobs, and the wider list of kitchen tasks sits on professional TV wall mounting.