Which door goes on the corner unit?
The kitchen has twenty-six doors and drawer fronts. They were taken off on Monday, numbered in pencil on the back, and taken to the spray shop. The hinges and handles went into bags. On Thursday, the doors come back sprayed. The pencil numbers are under the paint, two drawer fronts look identical but are not, and one door has a small run on the edge that nobody noticed in the shop.
Refitting takes twice as long as planned while the painter works out which door goes where, and one bag of handles is missing.
Why respray jobs get mixed up
A respray job splits the kitchen into pieces that go through several stages away from the house. Paper labels and pencil marks do not survive prep and spraying, and nobody tracks each piece through the shop.
- Pieces are numbered in pencil or on tape that is removed for spraying.
- Positions in the kitchen are not photographed.
- Hinges and handles are bagged without clear labels.
- Stages in the spray shop are not tracked per piece.
- Quality checks happen when pieces are refitted.
What the mix-ups cost
Refitting takes longer. Pieces that need a touch-up go back to the shop, delaying completion. Lost handles or hinges have to be matched and bought. And the customer, who has been without a kitchen for days, is impatient.
Respray work also depends heavily on reputation. Customers choose respraying over a new kitchen partly because it is quicker and less disruptive, so a job that overruns because doors are mixed up undermines the whole reason they chose it. Reviews for respray work often mention how smoothly the refit went, and that is the part most likely to go wrong.
And the spray shop itself can become a bottleneck without anyone noticing. When pieces from several kitchens are in the shop at once, at different stages, it is easy for one job's doors to sit waiting while another's are rushed through. Without tracking, the owner only finds out when a customer rings.
The tracking we build
- Before removal, the painter photographs the kitchen and each unit, and each piece is given a tag that survives the process, such as a heat-resistant label in a hidden spot or a tag on the hinge holes.
- The app records each piece's position against a simple kitchen plan, and its hinges and handles in a bag with the same tag number.
- In the spray shop, each piece is scanned through stages: degrease, sand, prime, coats, cure, quality check.
- The quality check is recorded per piece with a photo, and any piece needing rework is flagged before it leaves the shop.
- When pieces return, they are scanned back in against the plan, and the refit list shows each position with its door and its bag of hardware.
- The customer can be sent progress updates showing how many pieces are through each stage.
| Stage | Tracked |
|---|---|
| Removal | Position, photo, tag, hardware bag |
| Prep | Degrease, sand |
| Coats | Primer and top coats |
| Quality check | Pass or rework, photo |
| Refit | Scanned back to position |
A refit that goes back first time
Every door goes back where it came from, with its own hinges and handles. Faults are caught in the shop, not on the wall. The customer knows when their kitchen will be back. And you can see how pieces move through the shop, which shows where the bottlenecks are when you take on more respray work.
Does this sound like your respray jobs?
- Doors are hard to match back to positions.
- Handles or hinges have gone missing.
- Faults are found when refitting.
- Customers ask repeatedly when their kitchen will be done.
- You do not know how many pieces are at each stage in the shop.