How long does a kitchen respray take in Plymouth? A typical 5-day timeline — day-by-day, what happens, and when your kitchen is usable.
The honest answer: a typical Plymouth kitchen respray takes five days from the moment we collect your doors to the moment they're refitted and you can cook a curry. Some are two, some are five, but five is the average — and the breakdown below shows exactly why.
We arrive at 8 a.m. We unload masking sheets, dust barriers, our compressor, the spray gun and the paint. The first two hours are protection: every worktop, appliance, light fitting, socket and skirting board gets covered. We tape off door frames, window frames and floor edges. By the end of this stage your kitchen looks like a hospital tent — which is the point.
Once the room is sealed, we unscrew every door and drawer front and label them on the back so we know exactly which goes where. They get loaded into the van and head to our workshop. By lunchtime we are spraying the carcasses, side panels, end panels and kickboards in situ with water-based paint — safe for kids and pets, no harmful fumes, and dry to touch in under an hour.
We finish Day 1 around 4 p.m. with the on-site spraying complete. Your kitchen is missing its doors and drawer fronts but everything else (oven, hob, fridge, sink, taps) works exactly as before. You can cook. You can wash up. You just have to look at open cupboards for one night.
This is the day customers usually go "oh, that's it?" Your doors are 7 miles up the road in our Plympton workshop being sprayed in dust-free, climate-controlled conditions. We sand, prime, sand again, mist coat, full coat, then a second full coat. Each coat needs 4–6 hours to dry properly.
You don't need to be home. You don't even need to be in the country. We are working on the doors, not in your house. Most of our customers go to work as normal. By the end of Day 2 the doors are sprayed, cured and ready to be refitted in the morning.
Bigger kitchen? 25+ doors with an island or pantry extends Day 2 across two workshop days. Plan for 4 days total, not 3.
We are back at 8 a.m. Doors and drawer fronts come out of the van in clean blankets. We refit every one in the order they came off, adjust hinges so they sit dead flush, refit handles (or drill new holes if you've changed to bars), then walk the room with you. Any tiny knock or scuff that happened during refit gets touched up by hand. By lunchtime — sometimes earlier — we are clean, packed and gone.
From your point of view: you lost the use of your cupboards for 2 nights and the use of one tradesman-disrupted day. That is it.
A new fitted kitchen takes six to ten weeks: order, manufacture, delivery, rip-out, plastering, electrics, plumbing, install, snagging. Each of those is a separate trade with a separate diary. A respray is one trade, one team, one paint system — so it collapses into days.
For a full comparison see our kitchen respray vs new kitchen piece.
For small kitchens (under 10 doors) we sometimes finish in two days. For a single colour change with no repairs and no special finish, we can occasionally compress the timeline. We'd rather build in a margin for proper drying than rush a job and have you find a fingerprint in the topcoat next week.
Yes — fully, except for the door cabinets themselves. The sink, hob, oven, fridge, dishwasher, kettle, taps and worktops all stay live. You'll see contents through the open cupboard frames on Day 1 and Day 2, then everything is back to normal on Day 3. We use water-based paint indoors so there are no overpowering fumes either.
If you can give up the use of your cupboard doors for a few days while we spray them in the workshop, plus one tradesman-day in the house for the masking and in-situ spray and another for the refit, you walk away with a kitchen that looks brand new and a saving of £6,000 to £20,000 versus replacement. Most of our Plymouth customers tell us afterwards they wish they'd done it years sooner.
Two days for kitchens with 10 doors or fewer. One day for masking, on-site spraying and door collection, then one workshop day before refit.
Four to five days. The extra time is workshop spraying for the higher door count and island sides — the on-site work and refit is the same.
Yes. We use water-based paints indoors, so there are no harmful fumes. Most customers work from home throughout. Pets and kids are fine.
Yes, almost entirely. The sink, hob, oven, fridge, dishwasher and worktops stay live. Only the cupboard doors and drawer fronts are off — and only for two nights.
Only if you ask. Standard scope is door fronts, drawer fronts, carcass faces, end panels and kickboards. Interior carcass spraying is available at a small extra charge.