Cabinet guide
Refacing and replacing answer two different problems, and the thing that decides between them is the condition of the boxes you already have rather than how tired the kitchen looks from the doorway.
Refacing is cheaper, usually by a lot. Nationally it runs $4,000 to $9,500 and averages around $7,200, which works out to roughly $150 to $450 per linear foot. Full custom replacement starts at about $500 per linear foot and climbs from there.
Call it a third to a half of what replacing costs. The gap comes from what you are not paying for. Nobody rips out the carcasses, nobody rebuilds the run, and there is no lead time on boxes because the boxes are already in your kitchen.
The saving shrinks as the kitchen gets bigger and the spec gets richer. A large kitchen refaced in a premium door and veneer can land close enough to a modest replacement that the comparison stops being obvious, and at that point you are paying refacing money for a kitchen that keeps its original layout.
Around $7,200 for a typical kitchen, with most jobs falling in that $4,000 to $9,500 band.
What that buys is new doors and drawer fronts, matching veneer over the visible faces of the boxes, and new hinges. Hardware and soft-close mechanisms are usually a separate line, and they are worth pricing at the same time since the doors are off anyway. That is the work covered by cabinet door replacement and cabinet hardware and soft-close upgrades.
Door style and material drive the number the same way they do on a new kitchen. A paint grade shaker sits at the bottom of the range and a solid hardwood raised panel sits at the top.
The layout is fixed. Where the sink sits, how wide the drawer bank is, where the awkward dead corner falls, all of it stays exactly where it is. If what actually bothers you about the kitchen is how it works rather than how it looks, refacing spends real money without solving the problem.
The interiors stay old too. New doors on shelves that sag and drawer boxes that stick is a common regret, so the inside of the run is worth looking at before the outside gets quoted. Pull-out shelves for cabinets in Louisville fix a good part of that at the same visit.
Then there is the box condition itself, which is the one that disqualifies the job entirely. Refacing assumes the carcass is sound. Veneering over a swollen base or a rack of shelves that has already given up puts a new face on a cabinet that is failing underneath, and it will look wrong within a couple of years.
Fifteen to twenty years is reasonable, and often longer, because the parts doing the structural work were never touched.
The doors are new, the veneer is new and the hinges are new. What determines the lifespan is the boxes, and if they were solid enough to reface in the first place then they carry on being solid. Kitchens where refacing disappoints are nearly always kitchens where the boxes should have failed the inspection and did not get one.
Open a door and look at the carcass instead of the front. Solid sides, square corners, shelves sitting flat, no swelling at the base near the dishwasher. That check takes two minutes and it decides the whole project.
Three situations. The boxes have gone, the layout has to change, or the room will not take standard sizes.
That last one is common in older Louisville housing. Walls in the Highlands, St. Matthews and parts of Anchorage are frequently out of square, and openings turn up that nothing standard covers. Cabinetry scribed to the actual measurements is the only thing that closes those gaps cleanly, which is what custom kitchen cabinets in Louisville are for. Newer stock in Middletown and Jeffersontown is squarer and typically has boxes worth keeping, so refacing tends to be the better trade out there.
Three different jobs that get used interchangeably, and they are not the same work.
Refacing replaces the doors and drawer fronts and veneers the boxes, so the door style and the material can both change. Cabinet refinishing in Louisville keeps your existing doors and strips them back, so the style cannot change but the original wood is preserved, and it runs about $2,000 to $4,500. Cabinet painting keeps the doors and covers the grain, most commonly $1,500 to $5,000. All three assume the boxes are structurally sound.
If the doors are good and the colour is the only problem, refinishing or painting gets you there for less than refacing does, and we will say so rather than quote you the bigger job.
Look at the boxes, then the layout, then the doors, in that order. Failed boxes means replacement. Sound boxes and a layout that works means refacing. Sound boxes, good doors and a dated colour means refinishing.
The full scope of the middle option is on cabinet refacing in Louisville, and if you want the numbers on going the other way, we break those down in how much custom cabinets cost in Louisville. Doors and boxes both fine but something specific is broken? That is cabinet repair in Louisville.
Get a free written estimate and we will look at the carcasses before quoting anything.
Tell us the room and what you want out of it. You get a written estimate broken down by stage, free, with nothing to sign.
