Re-Facing Kitchen Cabinets

When your cabinet doors and fronts are worn beyond repair, or you're just tired of looking at the same old thing, you have two choices: replace them or reface them.

Your Kitchen's Best Face
With the kitchen being such a focal point of the home, you'll want to make sure that it not only looks its best, but that it is also functional. Resale value of your home is obviously an important consideration, too. Prospective buyers will be willing to pay more for an attractive, functional modern kitchen. But a complete kitchen re-design can cost tens of thousands of dollars and take months to finish.

Once you approve the plan, it will build all of the custom doors, drawer fronts, cabinet facing, and other elements to your specification. Staff will install the attractive new replacements, and your kitchen will look brand new. The whole process can often be completed in a single week.

DIY
If you want to do the work on your own, many kitchen remodeling companies sell the doors, drawer fronts, and materials you'll need to reface your own cabinets. The large home improvement stores are also great resources for materials.

At the least difficult level, you can add hardware, moldings, or wood appliques to plain cabinet doors and fronts. Depending on how elaborate you make it, this can simply dress up your old cabinets or change their appearance entirely. Adding a new paint color or multicolor scheme makes this refacing even more effective.

The next option is to buy new doors for your existing cabinets. Replacing an all-too-familiar panel door with a sleek new European-style door¡ªor a plain flush door with a raised-panel style¡ªcan effect an amazing transformation. This works best with overlay doors, which cover the stiles and rails and limit the amount of reworking necessary in those areas.

If you want to go the distance and completely reface your old cabinets, you can buy high-quality self-sticking veneers in just about any wood species. Some of these veneers have a peel-off paper backing, and some are applied with heat. Professional cabinet refacers use special heat tools, but an ordinary clothes iron works just as well. After the veneer is on, you stain and finish it the same as you would any other new wood.

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