refacing vs. refinishing kitchen cabinets

Just paint them white, unless they're raised-panel ... in which case, have them moved to Ho-Ho-Kus or Cos Cob or Piscataway or some other suburb with a ridiculous name. In the latter case, paint them white first to be polite.

Better than this is to just get new cabinets they are cheap

AH - I hope you weren't kidding about painting them white, because that is actually what I want to do. I just can't figure out why contractors who are estimating my job are trying to convince me to "reface" them.
aalsberg - I must have the wrong contractors estimating my job because new cabinets don't seem cheap to me! (then again, I suppose I am the one who could be cheap . . .)

Your are correct. Refacing is just gluing laminate over the doors. Refinishing involves sanding down the doors and staining them or painting them. If the doors are "dated", you could just replace them.

I had a dated kitchen, but the cabinets were solid. I just replaced the doors. You can cap the ends of the cabinets with high quality wood veneer or another door. You can also get wood veneer trim in strips to go around the cabinet where the door meets it. I had that done and the doors and veneers were purchased through Walzcraft.com. I also added their crown molding. Everything matched perfectly. It was like a brand new kitchen!

Your are correct. Refacing is just gluing laminate over the doors. Refinishing involves sanding down the doors and staining them or painting them. If the doors are "dated", you could just replace them.

I had a dated kitchen, but the cabinets were solid. I just replaced the doors. You can cap the ends of the cabinets with high quality wood veneer or another door. You can also get wood veneer trim in strips to go around the cabinet where the door meets it. I had that done and the doors and veneers were purchased through Walzcraft.com. I also added their crown molding. Everything matched perfectly. It was like a brand new kitchen!

Nycnovice,

When we talk about refacing it is not exactly gluing laminate to the existing. When we reface we replace all the doors and sometimes the panels as well. Sometimes we have to glue laminate to a panel but never the doors. It is also possible to spray your cabinets onsite which usually comes out great. There are some inexpensive cabinets such as Ikea which I recommend highly.

There are many Ikea kitchens on my site. www.primerenovationsnyc.com. Look under gallery and then kitchens. Not all are Ikea but there are many.

Thanks all.
Primer - Many have recommended IKEA, but that look is too contemporary for me and doesn't feel right for our old little apartment. I kind of like the time warp feel and think we are just going to paint existing.

In our dated oaky(fourth) bathroom upstate I had no interest in gutting it. I asked the contractors to paint everything white and it looks 100% better! although still not ideal. It sounds as though your cabinets are better, go for it.

Nucnovice

Nothing wrong with painting them. Just find out how the contractor is going to do it. Spraying is probably the best way to go

We ended up putting in all new cabinets. We had been torn between minor cosmetic fixes and gut renovation; we decided on gut renovation. Actually, I'm not sure if I am using that term correctly - we completely gutted the kitchen and the bathroom; the other rooms (living room, study and bedroom), we just refinished the floors (prior owner had beautiful herringbone floors from 1929 covered in carpet!!!!) and skim-coated and painted the walls. We also replaced the PTACs and commissioned custom built-ins to house and frame those on either side.

NYC Novice, how much did you end up paying for the gut reno of your kitchen? Also, what was the size and how high end did you go with floors, appliances, countertops, etc? Many thanks!

Hi Lz3 - Our kitchen is 7x11. We had our contractor break out labor by room separate from materials. We ended up paying $27,600 total in labor for the gut reno of the kitchen. The initial estimate was $20,500, but we changed our mind about a few things along the way, which increased the cost considerably. The cost for the change orders in our case was appropriate because we did not take the time to think through everything we really wanted at the outset; anyone who has renovated will tell you this is hard to do, because once you get going, you think, hmmm - I need more light here. In our case the change orders involved dropping the ceiling to add overhead dimmable LED lights and adding undercabinet LED lights. We also added soundproofing and waterproofing to the floor and requested a labor intensive product for the waterproofing (Laticrete 9235), plus we decided to do more backsplash tiling and added outlets and lightswitches, etc. Hope this info helps; if you want better opinions of what this can/should cost, I recommend searching renovation threads for posts by Primer05, Kylewest, nyc10023 and alanhart. I read all their posts when I was going through the process and found those posts to be quite helpful.

P.S. to Lz3 - I think I provided you with the information you were looking for (labor cost); to the extent you were looking for materials cost, the sky is the limit here, but FWIW, we went with ceasarstone, porcelain tile, miele dishwasher, bertazonni range, custom cabinets, Bosch microwave. What I will note here is that we agreed to purchase our materials through our contractor, so I suspect he made some money there which may have affected how much he charged us on the labor; we paid quite a bit for materials and are fine with what we paid though I suspect we could have paid less had we gotten them on our own (but that involves time that we did not have). There is no substitute for getting estimates to get an idea of what your project will cost at the particular moment that you choose to undertake it. Our chosen contractor was not our lowest estimate and was actually the highest (gap between highest and lowest not huge - something like 10%). We ultimately made our choice based on the contractor's references and we are overall very pleased with the result.

Lz3 - We recently completed a gut reno to a kitchen (approx. 7 x 12). I have an itemized list of costs for GC, tile, cabinets, etc. I can share with you. Contact me at dan@novaarchitecture.com if interested.

I was going to reface the cabinets in my kitchen. It would have entailed all new doors with hinges, and new hardware. Cost would have been around 16-18 thousand. The counters are good, and just need polishing. However, I am now going to move, so I am very glad I did nothing!

You guys should compare with the kitchen reno that New2me did. She did a complete renovation rather than a gut renovation, and her kitchen was a little different sized, 11 x 7.

Lately I've been renovating my kitchen. At first I was frightened by the idea, as it required lots of money to spend and time to put. And we were at lack of both. So I was searching the Internet and luckily I came across a web based kitchen planner with the function of immediately cost calculation on the cabinets and materials chosen. It's called online 3D kitchen constructor. I made a great use of it and finally planned a very nice kitchen http://prodboard.eu/kitchen/#project-sample-6 Maybe you'll also find it useful for your dimema solving as you can try diffenet colours and materials for the existing cabinets as well as new cabinets. In the end you will be able to decide what looks better.