Frugal Kitchen Remodel: Reface the Cabinets

Sunset kitchen - AFTER

Sometimes painting just isn't an option. Peeling laminate, bad condition, or just a completely wrong style can all point in the direction of taking the next step: refacing the kitchen cabinets.

We are in one such situation, with 1970's laminate doors and integrated pulls in our otherwise cottage-y kitchen. Painting alone would not save these babies, but we like the layout, and storage space is plentiful. So we're looking to refacing as an option.

The gallery above shows a few befores and afters from some pretty successful refacing jobs. "Afters" are shown in the top row with their corresponding "befores" below.

Here's how refacing works:

Old doors and drawer fronts are removed.

The remaining cabinet boxes are refinished in place, in preparation for their pretty new doors.

New doors and drawer fronts are fabricated to size and installed in place of the old.

To save on the budget, we are considering having new doors made unfinished. We would paint them ourselves, as in our old place we would prefer the brush stroke on wood over a perfect factory finish.

Cabinet refacing is a particularly great option when the cabinet boxes themselves are in good condition and suitable for staying in place. It can save a lot on material waste, demo work, time, and kitchen mess.

Have any readers had their cabinets refaced? Please tell us about it in the comments below!

(Images: Sunset, This Old House, pollywogkitchen, Lifestyle/Yahoo Canada, American Cabinet Refacing)

Comments (5)

In my previous house the kitchen cabinets were original to 1948. The bones were still good but the doors, which weighed 5 pounds each, were falling off the hinges and quite dinged up. I looked into replacing the hinges at first, but I couldn't find ones that would fit the old cabinetry. So we decided to have a refacing company make new doors for all our cabinets. To save money I didn't have the cabinet frames themselves refaced, I just painted them to match the doors. They also built me a cabinet from scratch for the new dishwasher. All in all I was quite pleased with the result. The new doors were seamless and it really looked like we had put in all new cabinets. The remodel really did a lot in helping to sell our house fairly quickly in a bad market.

I'm a kitchen designer in Cleveland and often when I price out refacing vs. new cabinets, they come in close to the same. The doors are the most expensive part of the cabinet, and not all cabinets have the same dimensions. To order doors requires custom measurments to your cabinets specs, and often, at that point, you're better off just replacing the whole cabinet because dealing with the custom measurements and sizing per square foot for the doors can turn into a headache very quickly. If you are staying with the same brand of cabinets and just reordering doors it is much easier. Just my two cents as a professional in the business.

I am also a Kitchen Designer and I agree with JENK968. The cost of refacing is generally around the same as replacing the whole cabinet. However, if you replace the entire cabinet you can get a higher quality box and some of the new "bells & whistles" like fitted internal accessories, roll-outs, pull-out trash, etc.

But I do see the point about reusing the existing cabinet boxes as a "greener" version of a kitchen remodel. However, if you decide to get all new cabinets, you could always sell or donate your old ones.

We did this a couple of years ago, in a small kitchen with a lot of cabinets. The cost of refacing was about 50-60 percent of the quotes we were getting for entirely new cabinets. The refacing included new doors, and also new drawers (not just drawer fronts). We are happy with the results (although I would not recommend the company because they were difficult to deal with).

I'm late to this commenting party but...

I'm doing this now. The cost of new cabinets at the very cheapest (ikea) was $3000. So we bought unfinished doors and are painting and hanging them ourselves for $600. Yeah, major save. Sorry Kitchen Designers!