Cabinet Refacing vs.
Cabinet Replacement

Cabinets are usually 35–45% of a kitchen remodel budget, so refacing is the single biggest lever you have for bringing a project down in price. It is also the option that gets oversold. Here is when it genuinely works and when it is money thrown at a kitchen that needed something else.

Cost Comparison

What Refacing Actually Is

Refacing keeps your existing cabinet boxes exactly where they are and replaces everything you see: new doors, new drawer fronts, and a veneer or laminate skin applied over the exposed box faces and end panels. New hinges and hardware go on at the same time.

Done well, the result is genuinely indistinguishable from new cabinets to anyone who is not opening doors and inspecting the interiors. Done badly — thin peel-and-stick veneer over a damaged box — it looks exactly like what it is within a year.

What refacing cannot change: the layout. If your cabinets are in the wrong place, if you want a bigger island, if the pantry is too small, or if you need to move the sink, refacing does not help you. You are keeping the footprint you have.

The Five-Minute Test

Before you call anyone, go open your cabinets and check these five things. This is exactly what we look at on a site visit.

Three or more green lights and refacing is a strong option. Two or fewer and we will usually tell you to save up and replace.

When Replacement Is the Better Spend

• The layout needs to change. Moving the sink, adding an island, opening a wall — none of that is compatible with keeping existing boxes.
• The boxes are particleboard and aging. Common in Middle Tennessee homes built from the late 1980s through the 1990s with builder-grade cabinetry.
• You want deeper drawers or specialty storage. Pull-outs, trash drawers and deep pan drawers generally require new boxes.
• You are already gutting the kitchen. If flooring, counters and appliances are all being replaced, the incremental cost of new boxes is smaller than it looks and you get a kitchen designed around how you actually cook.

The Third Option Nobody Mentions: Paint

If the boxes are solid, the layout works, and the doors are a shape you can live with, painting costs $1,800–$3,500 and gets you 70% of the visual change of refacing for a third of the price.

It works best on solid wood or MDF doors with a profile you like. It works poorly on thermofoil and on flat particleboard doors with a printed finish — paint does not bond well to those and will chip at the edges.

Done properly it is a real job: doors come off, everything is degreased, sanded, primed with a bonding primer, and sprayed rather than brushed. A sprayed cabinet finish looks like furniture. A brushed one looks like a weekend project, because that is what it is.

Not Sure Which Way to Go?

We will come look at your boxes and tell you straight — including when the honest answer is "paint these and put the money into counters instead." We would rather do a smaller job well than sell you something that does not solve your actual problem.

Call (615) 821-2275 or use the form below.

See our kitchen renovation page, or the kitchen remodel cost guide for how cabinets fit the overall budget.

FAQs \u2014 Refacing vs. Replacement