About Calmodern

A Long Beach Shop That Sprays Doors

Calmodern refinishes kitchen cabinets and paints interiors across Long Beach. Most of our work sits inside a five mile radius of the shop on Long Beach Blvd, in the bungalows of Belmont Heights and Rose Park, the post war stucco tracts further east, the flat roofed mid century houses, and the two storey duplexes with the alley garages behind them.

We narrowed down to cabinets on purpose. Painting a wall and refinishing a cabinet door are different trades that happen to share a paint aisle. A wall is seen from across a room in soft indirect light and gets touched almost never. A door is seen from arm’s length under a fixture pointed at it, and gets touched by a wet hand every day of its life. The finish that survives that has to be applied differently, which in practice means it has to be sprayed.

How we work

• The doors leave. Every door and drawer front comes off, gets a number, gets photographed with its hardware, and travels to the rack. They are sprayed lying flat, because a horizontal surface lets the film level under its own weight instead of running down a vertical face.
• The boxes stay. Face frames and cabinet interiors are masked and sprayed in your kitchen. You keep the sink, the appliances and the counters through the whole job.
• Preparation gets the hours. Degrease, sand to a uniform dull surface, fill and sand the defects, then a bonding primer picked for what the doors are actually made of. This is most of the labour and all of the durability.
• We say when not to. Peeling thermofoil, water swollen sink bases and a layout you already dislike are not paint problems. We would rather lose the job than take money for a finish that is going to fail underneath.

Straight answers about time

A full kitchen runs four to six working days. The finish is dry to touch the same day and keeps hardening for about three weeks after that, which is the part nobody mentions. We hang the doors when they can be handled safely and we tell you to be gentle with them for the rest of the month. That is not us covering ourselves. It is how a waterborne enamel cures.

Call (562) 785-5594 or come by 6848 Long Beach Blvd, Long Beach, CA 90810. A photo of one open door, shot from the hinge side, usually gets you a real number without anyone driving anywhere.