Refacing, Refinishing or Replacing Cabinets

The three options are distinguished by exactly one thing: how far into the cabinet the work goes. Hold that and the rest of this guide becomes obvious.

Refinishing keeps your existing doors and changes their finish. The doors come off, get stripped or sanded back, and are recoated, usually in a shop rather than in the kitchen.

It is the right answer when the doors are structurally sound and well proportioned, the carcasses are sound, and the only complaint is the colour or a tired surface. That combination is commoner than people expect in older houses, where the original doors are often solid timber and better made than most of what would replace them. Replacing a sound solid timber door with a modern sheet material door is a downgrade dressed as an upgrade.

Its limits are absolute. It cannot change the style, the size, the overlay or anything about the carcass. And preparation is the entire job: cabinets that have been cooked around for decades carry a film that nothing adheres to, and a finish applied over inadequate preparation fails at an edge within a year while looking identical on day one.

We could not verify a published Riverside figure for refinishing, so this guide does not print one. What we can say is that it generally costs less than refacing, because nothing is manufactured, and that the labour is concentrated in preparation rather than in fitting.

Refacing supplies new doors and drawer fronts and applies a facing material to the visible carcass faces, so that the old finish does not show between the new doors. The carcasses stay and therefore the layout stays.

It is the right answer when the carcasses are sound and the layout works but the doors are the problem, whether because of style, condition or proportion. Done well it is indistinguishable from a new kitchen from the outside, which is the whole appeal.

A published cost page written for Riverside gives real figures for this market, broken down in useful detail.

Replacement removes the existing cabinets and installs new ones. It is the only option that can change the layout, resize an appliance opening, resolve a corner, or deal with a failed carcass.

The published figures are per linear foot of run installed: $75 to $400 and up per linear foot, installed for stock, $150 to $900 and up per linear foot, installed for semi-custom and $500 to $1,400 and up per linear foot, installed for custom. The Riverside cost page quotes $3,000 to $6,000 for new cabinets, $8,000 to $11,000 for stock and $15,000 to $20,000 for custom made, per kitchen.

Replacement also brings in the rest of the project in a way the other two do not. Countertops are templated off installed cabinets and therefore replaced and retemplated. Any services that move bring permits. Flooring decisions have to be made. The job is a project rather than a visit, which is why the published duration for refacing, at no less than three to five days, is such a strong argument in its favour for households that cannot lose a kitchen for weeks.

You cannot choose between these three by looking at the kitchen. You choose by opening it. Six findings decide the answer, and every one of them is visible in twenty minutes with a torch.

Cost gets most of the attention and disruption gets almost none, which is the wrong way round for a household that has to keep feeding people while the work happens.

Refinishing removes the doors and drawer fronts and takes them away. The carcasses stay in place and remain usable, so you lose the doors rather than the kitchen. The inconvenience is open cupboards and dust from preparation, which is manageable, and the duration is governed by how long the finish takes to cure properly rather than by how long the work takes.

Refacing is the least disruptive of the three relative to how much it changes. The published Riverside figure states no less than three to five days and notes specifically that no cabinet has to be removed, so the kitchen stays usable. Preparation dust and tradespeople in the room are the main intrusions.

Replacement takes the kitchen out of use. Demolition, any permitted trade work, installation, then a gap while the countertop is fabricated from a template taken off the installed cabinets, then splashback, hardware and the punch list. There is no way to compress the countertop gap, because the template cannot be taken before the cabinets are in. Households that cannot lose a kitchen plan a temporary arrangement for that period, and households that do not plan one find out why they should have.

That difference in disruption is a legitimate input to the decision, not a secondary one. A household with young children, a home worker or an elderly relative may rationally choose refacing over replacement on disruption grounds even where the budget would stretch.

Lead. Refinishing and refacing both involve sanding and preparing existing painted surfaces, and replacement involves removing them. All three are covered work in a home built before 1978. The firm must be certified, the requirement includes sole proprietorships, and the minor repair exemption covers only six square feet or less of paint per room inside. With 56.5 percent of this city's housing built in 1979 or earlier, that is most houses. See the EPA renovation, repair and painting page→.

Coating limits. Riverside is inside the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Rule 1113 caps coatings applied on site at 275 grams of VOC per litre for wood coatings, varnish, sanding sealers and lacquer, and 250 for interior stains. That matters most to refinishing, which is the option most likely to involve applying a coating rather than fitting a prefinished component.

Permits. None of the three needs a building permit for the cabinetry itself. Replacement needs one if services move or a wall is altered. Refacing and refinishing essentially never do, which is a genuine scheduling advantage.

The abstract comparison is useful; worked situations are more so. Here are five that come up constantly, with the honest answer for each.

“The kitchen is dark and I want it white.” If the doors are sound and the layout works, this is refinishing. Going from a dark stain to a painted white finish means stripping or heavy sanding and a full opaque system, which is more work than recolouring a stain, but it is still refinishing and it is still the cheapest of the three. If the doors are flat slab fronts in a style you dislike, it becomes refacing.

“The doors are fine, but the inside is useless.” None of the three. This is a hardware and interiors job: pull-out conversions in the base cupboards, a waste pull-out, soft close throughout. It costs a fraction of any of the three options and it is the single most under recommended piece of work in this trade.

“The sink cabinet has gone soft at the bottom.” That carcass is being replaced whatever happens to the rest. Whether the rest is refaced, refinished or replaced is a separate decision, and the sensible route is usually to replace that one box and reface or refinish around it.

“The fridge does not fit properly and there is nowhere to put a bin.” Replacement. Both of those are cabinet schedule problems: the opening is a carcass dimension and the bin needs a cabinet that does not currently exist. No amount of door work touches either.

“We are selling in six months.” Refinishing, or refacing at the most, plus hardware. A full replacement on that horizon is money spent for somebody else, and the parts a buyer notices, which are the doors, the hardware and whether the kitchen looks cared for, are precisely the parts the cheaper options address.