Cabinet Refacing

What refacing is, in one paragraph

The boxes stay. The doors, the drawer fronts and every visible surface are replaced, and the exposed sides and ends are covered in material that matches the new doors. When it is done properly the result is indistinguishable from new cabinetry, because everything you can see is new cabinetry. What you kept is the part nobody looks at.

It is not painting, and the two get confused constantly. Painting changes the colour of what you have, including the profile of the door you were tired of. Refacing changes the door.

And it is not a cheaper version of a kitchen remodel. It is a different project with a different scope: no plumbing moves, no electrical changes, no counters lifted, no layout altered. That is the whole reason it costs a fraction of a replacement and takes a fraction of the time.

When refacing is the right answer, and when it is money in the wrong place

The test is one minute long and it happens with a door open.

Look at the box, not the front. If the box is plywood, square, dry and solidly attached to the wall, it is a candidate. If the sides flex when you pull a drawer, if the bottom of the sink base has ever been wet, or if the material swells at the edges, it is not — refacing a failing box buys new doors on furniture that is on its way out.

Then look at the layout. If the kitchen works and the objection is how it looks, refacing solves the objection directly. If the objection is that the refrigerator is in the wrong place, that there is nowhere to put a dish while cooking, or that two people cannot pass, refacing spends real money and leaves the actual problem untouched.

That is the failure we see most often, and it is expensive precisely because the result looks good. A refaced kitchen with the old bad layout is a kitchen that annoys you every day and now looks too new to justify redoing.

The third question is how much of the kitchen you want to change. Refacing works on doors and surfaces. If you want a different sink position, an island where there is none, or cabinetry to the ceiling where it currently stops short, those are cabinet changes rather than door changes, and at that point a semi-custom replacement is often the better value.

What it costs, relative to the alternative

Refacing runs at a fraction of what replacing the same kitchen costs, and the fraction is wide because it depends on things that are easy to check before anyone quotes.

The door itself is the biggest lever. A flat slab in a laminate finish and a five-piece solid wood shaker are the same operation and very different materials, and the spread between them is larger than most people expect.

The number of doors and drawer fronts is the next one, and it is not the same as the number of cabinets. A bank of four drawers is four fronts. A kitchen with many small units costs more to reface than a kitchen with fewer wide ones, even if the square footage matches.

Exposed ends and islands add material. Every surface that is visible has to be covered to match, and an island finished on four sides is four surfaces rather than one.

And the condition of what stays decides whether there is preparation work. Boxes that need to be re-secured, shelves that have sagged, or hinges drilled for a system that no longer exists all add labour before a single new door goes on.

The honest way to find out is a walkthrough with the doors open and a count. Anybody quoting refacing from a photograph is quoting the photograph.

What changes on the inside, and why it matters more than the doors

The doors are what people buy and the interiors are what they notice afterwards.

Refacing is the moment to replace hinges, and it is not optional in practice: the new doors need hinges anyway, and the old ones are usually the reason doors sag and stop lining up. Soft-close is standard now and it is what makes a kitchen feel finished rather than functional.

It is also the cheapest moment you will ever get to convert a base cabinet from a shelf to drawers. The face is already coming off. A cabinet with a fixed shelf and a door wastes the back half of its volume, and the same box with full-extension drawers gives all of it back at standing height. If you do one upgrade during a refacing, this is the one.

Blind corners can be fitted with the mechanisms that make them reachable, waste and recycling can be moved into a pull-out, and trays can be given somewhere to stand upright. None of these require new boxes and all of them are far more work later.

How long the kitchen is out of service

Substantially less than a remodel, and the reason is structural rather than a matter of working faster.

Nothing is demolished. The plumbing is untouched, so the sink keeps working. The counters stay, so there is somewhere to put things. The appliances stay where they are and stay connected. What happens is that doors come off, surfaces are prepared and covered, and new doors go on.

The bulk of the calendar is not the work, it is the wait for the doors, which are made to your sizes and finish after the order. That wait happens with your kitchen fully usable, which is the opposite of a remodel where the room sits demolished during the same period.

The measurement happens before ordering and it happens twice for the same reason it does on new cabinetry: a door made to a number somebody wrote down wrong is a door that has to be made again.

What refacing does not fix

Worth naming plainly, because these are the disappointments.

It does not fix a countertop you dislike. The counter stays, and a kitchen with new doors and the old counter can look worse than before, because the new work makes the old surface obvious. If the counter is going, that decision belongs in the same conversation.

It does not fix cabinet height. If the uppers stop a foot short of the ceiling and that gap is what bothers you, refacing leaves the gap.

It does not fix a bad appliance position, a missing pantry, or a sink under the wrong window.

And it does not fix water damage. A sink base that has been wet needs to be dealt with as a repair before anything decorative happens to it, and covering it is the version of this job that comes back in two years.

Refacing in a Florida kitchen specifically

Humidity is the variable that changes the material conversation here, and it is why the same refacing job specified for a house up north is the wrong specification.

Doors move with moisture, and the ones that move least are the ones built to accommodate it. A five-piece door with a floating panel handles a humid kitchen better than a single wide panel that has nowhere to go. Thermofoil and laminate faces are dimensionally stable and are a genuinely good answer in a house that is closed up and cooled for months at a time, provided the heat sources near them are respected.

The finish matters as much as the material. Painted surfaces in a humid kitchen want a cured factory finish rather than something applied on site, because a site finish in Florida is being asked to cure in conditions nobody controls.

And the boxes deserve a look at the toe kick and the sink base before anything is committed, because those are where a slow leak or a wet floor shows up first and where the decision between refacing and replacing is usually actually made.

Refacing, painting and replacing, decided in order

Three routes, and the money is wasted when they are compared on price rather than on what each one solves.

Paint when the doors are sound, the profile is one you can live with, and the objection is colour alone. It is the least expensive by a distance and the most often dismissed too quickly.

Reface when the boxes are sound and the doors are the problem — dated, damaged, or a style that fights the room. It changes the kitchen substantially without touching anything mechanical.

Replace when the boxes are failing, when the layout is the actual complaint, or when the room is being reconfigured anyway. Refacing a kitchen whose real fault is the plan is money spent on the wrong problem, and it is the most expensive mistake of the three because it forecloses the right answer for a decade.

We will tell you which one your kitchen is, including when the answer is the cheapest one and including when the answer is that refacing is not worth doing here.

The doors, which is the decision you are actually making

Everything else on a refacing job is execution. The door is the product.

Solid wood five-piece doors are the traditional answer and the most forgiving in a humid house, because the centre panel floats and has somewhere to go when it moves. They take a stain beautifully and a paint finish well, and they carry a grain that reads as furniture rather than as a surface.

MDF painted doors are dimensionally the most stable thing available and take a factory paint finish better than wood does, because there is no grain to telegraph through. In a kitchen that is going to be white or a colour, this is frequently the better product and it is frequently cheaper. What it will not do is take a stain.

Laminate and thermofoil faces wrap a substrate in a durable surface, which makes them easy to live with and easy to clean. They are the value end and they have improved enormously; the honest caveat is heat, because a face like this next to an uninsulated oven side is the one failure mode that shows up years later.

Then the profile, which is where taste lives. A flat slab reads modern and shows every imperfection in the surface behind it. A shaker is the safest thing in the room and will still look deliberate in fifteen years. Raised panels read traditional and carry more visual weight, which a small kitchen may not have to spare.

The practical advice is to narrow by material first and profile second. Deciding you want a painted shaker before deciding whether it is wood or MDF leads to a conversation about price that is really a conversation about substrate.

What the days actually look like

Once the doors arrive the on-site work is short, and knowing the shape of it removes most of the anxiety.

The old doors and drawer fronts come off first, and the boxes get cleaned and assessed properly with everything open. Anything that needs to be re-secured gets dealt with here, which is why a small amount of preparation work sometimes appears at this stage rather than in the quote.

Then the visible surfaces get covered. Exposed ends, the sides of an island, any face frame that shows, and the strips between doors all get material that matches what is going on the front. This is the part that decides whether the finished kitchen reads as new cabinetry or as new doors on old cabinets, and it is the part that separates a good refacing job from a cheap one.

New hinges go on next, drilled where the new doors require rather than where the old ones happened to be. Then the doors and fronts are hung, and then they are adjusted, which is a real step and not a finishing touch.

Hardware goes on last. If you are changing handle style or size, the new holes may not land on the old ones, which is worth deciding before the doors are drilled rather than after.

Through all of it the kitchen stays connected. The sink runs, the appliances work, and the counters are there to put things on.

Refacing outside the kitchen

The same operation works anywhere there is sound casework and a tired face, and those rooms are usually cheaper than people assume because the door count is low.

Bathroom vanities are the most common. A vanity is a handful of doors and drawer fronts, the box is almost always fine, and the room is transformed by the same change that would cost several times as much in a kitchen. Where the counter is being replaced anyway, doing both together is the sensible sequence.

Laundry rooms and mudrooms are next, and they are the rooms where the interior upgrade matters more than the door. Converting a shelf to drawers or adding a proper pull-out changes how the room works far more than the finish does.

Built-ins, media walls and home office cabinetry are all candidates, and they are the ones where matching matters most, because a built-in that does not match the room it is in announces itself.

The one place refacing is usually wrong is a garage or a workshop, where the casework is taking abuse and the money is better spent on something built to be hit.

What to ask whoever is quoting your refacing

This service has more variation in quality than almost anything else in a house, because the finished job hides the work. Four questions separate the versions.

Ask what happens to the exposed ends and the face frames. If the answer is vague, the quote is for doors and the kitchen will look like doors on old cabinets. Matching material on every visible surface is the job.

Ask whether the hinges are being replaced and whether they are soft-close. New doors on old hinges is the shortcut that produces the sagging doors you were trying to escape.

Ask where the doors are made and how they are finished. A cured factory finish and a finish sprayed in a garage are different products with the same description, and in a Florida kitchen the difference is measured in years.

Ask what happens if a box turns out to need work once the doors are off. A quote that has no answer for this is a quote that will produce a change order, and the honest version tells you the range before it starts.

And ask to see a kitchen they refaced more than two years ago, rather than one finished last month. Refacing looks good on the day it is done. What separates the work is how it looks after two summers.

What a refacing walkthrough covers

It is short, and it is mostly opening things.

Every door gets opened and every box gets looked at from the inside. The sink base gets particular attention, and so does anything under a dishwasher. We check whether the boxes are plywood or particle, whether they are square, and whether they are properly secured to the wall and to each other.

Doors and drawer fronts get counted, because the count is the quote. Exposed ends and islands get measured, because that is material.

Hinges get identified, since the type in place decides whether the new doors can use the existing bores or need new ones.

And we ask what you actually dislike about the kitchen. If the answer turns out to be the layout rather than the doors, that is worth finding out at the walkthrough rather than after the doors arrive.