Kitchen repair
Most kitchens that annoy their owners do not need a remodel. They need eight things fixed. Kitchen repair is that work: the faucet that swings loose, the disposal that hums, the cabinet door hanging a quarter inch low, the counter you cannot see well enough to chop on. Wright’s Repairs handles those in one visit, at a written price, without asking you to commit to anything larger.
When repair is the right answer and when it is not
Wright’s builds kitchens for a living, so we are the wrong people to tell you that everything can be patched. The useful question is whether the layout works. If the room is fundamentally right and the parts have worn out, repair is the better value by a wide margin. If you are working around the layout every single day, money spent on parts postpones the real decision.
Signs the parts are the problem
Cabinet boxes are solid but doors sag and hinges rattle. The faucet drips and the disposal is on its second decade. Counters are sound and the backsplash grout has gone dark. Lighting is one fixture in the middle of the ceiling. Every one of those is a component at the end of its life in a room that is otherwise fine.
Signs the room is the problem
Two people cannot pass each other. The refrigerator door blocks the only walkway when it is open. There is no landing space beside the oven. Boxes are particleboard and swelling at the toe kick. At that point the honest recommendation is a kitchen remodel rather than nine service calls, and we will say so even though it is the slower sale.
The faucet and the sink you use forty times a day
Kitchen faucets take more cycles than anything else in the house, and the failure is usually the cartridge or the pull down hose rather than the whole fixture. Where the body is pitted or the finish has gone, kitchen faucet replacement is the better value, especially since a new single hole fixture on a three hole deck needs a plate you should not discover on the day.
Underneath, the cabinet floor tells you how long something has been leaking. Sink drain repair replaces the trap and reseats the basket, and drain cleaning takes the branch line when the water is backing up rather than dripping. We also check the valves while the doors are open, since shutoff valve replacement is trivial in the middle of another job and expensive as an emergency.
Disposals, dishwashers and the vent above the range
A disposal that hums is jammed and a disposal that clicks is dead, and both are a short visit. Garbage disposal replacement includes the mounting ring and the dishwasher inlet, which is the part that gets forgotten and then floods a cabinet a week later.
Dishwasher installation is the job most often done badly by delivery crews. The unit has to be leveled, anchored so it does not tip when the door is down, and plumbed with a proper high loop so drain water cannot run back into it. We will happily fix somebody else’s, and we find at least one of those three wrong most of the time.
Ventilation matters more than people think in a room where somebody actually cooks. Range hood installation swaps a unit at an existing duct. A recirculating hood that has never been ducted outside is a different conversation, because running a new duct through a wall or roof is remodel scope. For appliances that have failed rather than been replaced, appliance repair covers what is worth fixing.
Cabinet doors that hang crooked and drawers that stick
This is the most satisfying work in the room because it is fast and the result is obvious. Doors go out of alignment because hinges loosen, screws strip out of particleboard, and the box itself racks slightly over twenty years. Cabinet door and drawer repair resets the hinges into solid material, adjusts the reveal across a run so the gaps line up, and replaces drawer slides that have given up.
Soft close conversion belongs here too. Most modern hinges and slides retrofit onto older boxes, which quietly changes how the room feels without touching a door front. Where a face frame has split or a toe kick has swelled from a long slow leak, we fix the structure first, because hardware fastened into soft material will not hold.
What a cabinet visit usually includes:
- Hinge reset into solid wood, with longer screws where the old ones stripped
- Door and drawer alignment across the whole run, not just the offender
- Slide replacement, matched to the existing mounting pattern where possible
- Bumpers and dampers so the room stops announcing every cupboard
- Shelf pins and supports, which fail silently until something falls
Hardware, the cheapest real change in the room
Swapping knobs and pulls across a whole kitchen changes the room more per dollar than anything else on this page. The difficulty is not the screwdriver, it is the layout. Forty pulls set at slightly different heights look worse than the old hardware did, and a single hole knob becoming a two hole pull means new holes in every door front.
Cabinet hardware installation uses a jig so every piece lands in the same place relative to the door edge, and fills the old holes properly where the pattern changes. Bring the hardware or ask us to spec it. Either way, buy two extra, because kitchens almost always have one more door than anyone counted.
Light where you are actually chopping
A single ceiling fixture puts the cook in their own shadow at the counter, which is why so many kitchens feel dim no matter how many bulbs go in. Under cabinet lighting solves that for less than any other lighting change, and where an outlet is already inside a cabinet the whole run stays concealed with no new circuit involved.
Overhead work sits on the light fixture installation hub, including recessed lighting installation in an existing ceiling. Kitchens also carry more device work than any other room, and ground fault outlet installation plus outlet and switch replacement come up constantly in houses built before the requirement existed. A designed plan for the room belongs with kitchen lighting.
Counters, backsplash and the grout that went dark
Tile work in a kitchen fails at the joints long before it fails at the tile. Tile repair and regrout pulls the stained and cracked joints, resets anything loose and seals the field, which makes a fifteen year old backsplash read as maintained rather than tired. The caulk line where the counter meets the wall gets replaced at the same time, since that is the joint that moves.
A backsplash you want changed rather than cleaned is a different job with a different price, and it lives under backsplash installation with the design and build team. The same is true of counters. A chip or a seam we can address; a new surface across the room is a project, and it usually pulls the sink, the faucet and the backsplash with it.
Floors, trim and the wall above the cabinets
Kitchen floors take the worst of the house. A soft spot in front of the sink is usually a slow leak rather than wear, so we look under the cabinet before quoting anything. Floor repair and installation covers the patch and the transition, and squeaky floor repair handles the section by the island that announces everybody who walks past.
Walls and trim finish the room. Drywall patch repair closes what the old cabinet run or the old hood left behind, trim and door painting deals with the cabinet side of the doorway, and a full color change moves to the interior painting hub. Grease and steam mean kitchen walls need cleaning and a proper primer before paint, which is the step people skip.
Storage you already have and are not using
Before anybody talks about adding cabinets, it is worth looking at the dead space in the ones you own. A pantry with four fixed wire shelves at the wrong heights wastes a foot of vertical space in every bay. Shelving installation re-spaces the run, anchors it into studs and adds a shelf where the gap was pointless.
Deep base cabinets are the other offender, where everything past the front eight inches becomes archaeology. Pull out trays retrofit into most existing boxes and cost a fraction of new cabinetry. If the answer really is more room rather than better room, a dedicated prep and storage space belongs with the butler’s pantry work on the design and build side.
The leak under the kitchen nobody noticed
Kitchens hide water better than any room in the house, because the evidence is inside a cabinet nobody empties. A supply line weeping a drop an hour does no visible damage for a year and then takes the subfloor, the cabinet base and the flooring in the next room with it. That is the single most expensive small failure we get called to.
When it has already happened, water leak response stops it and finds the source, which is often not where the stain is. Before it happens, water damage prevention swaps braided supply lines, checks the dishwasher connection and looks at the valves. Empty the cabinet under your sink this week and look at the back corner with a flashlight. It takes a minute and it is the highest return minute in this whole article.
Kitchen work we hand to somebody else
Gas appliance connection goes to a licensed plumber, every time. So does moving a supply line, opening a wall to reroute a drain, or anything that needs a permit. The boundary and the reasoning are laid out on the minor plumbing repair hub, and the full published list of work we do not take is worth reading before you build your list.
Appliance installation as part of a designed kitchen, with cabinetry built around the units, sits under kitchen appliance installation rather than here. Layout questions, whether an island fits or a wall can come out, belong with kitchen design. Asking those questions of a repair crew gets you a polite answer and a phone number.
How a kitchen repair visit actually runs
Send photographs of the sink cabinet with the doors open, the run of cabinets from a few feet back, and anything specific you want dealt with. That is usually enough to price the visit without anybody driving out. You get a written scope and a flat number, with anything genuinely uncertain named as uncertain.
The kitchen stays usable. Water goes off for an hour at most, the run of cabinets we are working on gets emptied by you beforehand if hardware is changing, and the room is cleaned before we leave. Nothing about this needs you to eat takeout for a week, which is the main reason people put kitchen work off.
Kitchen lists group unusually well with the rest of the house, since the same crew is already in the building. Plenty of visits pick up trim and finish carpentry in the next room or a door repair on the way past, and the bundled versions sit on the home repair packages page.
Where we work across Southeast Michigan
Our crews cover Washtenaw, Wayne, Oakland, Macomb, Livingston and Monroe counties. Kitchen age tracks neighborhood closely. Prewar houses in Ann Arbor often have a kitchen that was remodeled in the eighties inside a room built in nineteen twenty six, which means plaster behind the cabinets and wiring that predates the countertop appliances now plugged into it.
Ranches and colonials through Livonia, Canton and Plymouth tend to have original builder cabinets with sound boxes and failed hardware, which is the ideal case for this kind of work. Rental heavy areas around Ypsilanti generate the turnover version of the same list, on a much tighter clock.
Those turnover lists are worth planning ahead of time rather than in the four days between tenants. Rental turnover repairs is built for that window, and the same crew handles pre listing repairs when the kitchen is the room an agent wants fixed first.
Newer construction out toward Novi and South Lyon brings a different list again. The cabinets are fine and the hardware is fine, but the room was specified to a budget in a builder’s showroom, so the upgrades people want are lighting, a better faucet and soft close on doors that never had it. That work is almost entirely reversible, which matters if you are not planning to stay.
Get the kitchen working again
The gap between a kitchen you tolerate and a kitchen you like is often a day of work and a few hundred dollars of parts. Hardware, hinges, a faucet, light under the cabinets and clean grout will change a room more than most people expect, and none of it commits you to anything larger later.
If the list turns out to be a remodel after all, you will hear it from us plainly. Meanwhile you can View our Portfolio to see the kitchens our crews build, or contact us now for a free quote on the repair list you already have.
