Should You Consider Refacing Your Kitchen Cabinets
If your kitchen cabinets are showing their age, or you really never liked them in the first place, you'd probably love to replace them. On the other hand, kitchen cabinet replacement is a major project that's not only fairly expensive, it disrupts your daily life for weeks.
For that reason (not to mention ubiquitous advertising), kitchen cabinet refacing is a really popular option. It takes two or three days, and costs between a third and a half what it would cost to replace the cabinets.
The process, usually done by a team of two craftspeople, starts with removing the existing doors and face frames on the cabinets. After preparing the surfaces on the cabinet's box, the installers put on the new face frames and doors. They will also finish all exposed surfaces of the old cabinets to match the new doors — side panels, undersides, etc., and put in a new toe kick, as well as any moldings and trims the homeowner has ordered.
Refacing is so popular that today it's available in pretty much the same materials and finishes as the original cabinets in most cases: melamine, thermofoil, wood veneer or solid wood.
Installers point out that quite often older cabinets — those built 20 or 30 years ago and earlier — are often excellent candidates for refacing because, in essence, they're more solidly build and use better materials than even the high-end cabinets of today. For example, even the boxes of older cabinets are often made of solid wood, which is all but unheard-of today.
But refacing isn't for everybody or every kitchen. The most crucial issues have to do with the structural integrity of your current cabinets, and your happiness with the current kitchen layout. The real deal-breakers:
- If you want to change the layout of your kitchen, refacing will not solve your problem. You'll just get a prettier version of what's not working for you now.
- If your house has settled, leaving the floors uneven and the cabinets crooked, refacing will just perpetuate the problem.
- If the underlying cabinet boxes aren't structurally sound — rusted metal, deteriorated fiberboard, warped wood — refacing may not be possible and certainly won't yield satisfactory results.
On the other hand,
- If you're satisfied with the layout of the kitchen (whether because it suits you or because you're planning to sell in the near future) and your existing cabinets are structurally sound, Your kitchen is a prime candidate for cabinet refacing — and it's definitely worth your while to seek out the right professional who can deliver exactly what you want.