I have an old kitchen, should I reface the cabinets or should I replace the whole kitchen?

Q:

I have an old kitchen, should I reface the cabinets or should I replace the whole kitchen?

A:
To answer this question there is certain things that you will have to decide on first. These decisions will help shape the best way for you to proceed.

What is your budget?

One of the biggest questions is your budget. If you are working on a tight budget then you should think about re-facing them. The re-facing of a kitchen only works on the cheap if you do a lot of the work yourself. You could remove all the cabinet doors and the drawer fronts, sand them down and then either repaint them yourself or have a professional repaint them. If your budget is a little bigger you could pay a professional to do this work for you.

What work do you want to do?

The basic facelift to a kitchen is usually repainting the kitchen cabinets, doors and drawers, changing the counter tops, sinks and appliances. You can change the flooring, repaint the walls and change the lighting.

Remember all that work and you still have an older style kitchen that looks newer; but it won’t be a new kitchen.

Removing the entire kitchen and starting again is by far the most expensive option, but it is also the option that allows you to have the kitchen that you really want. With a new kitchen you get everything you want and depending on the age of your old kitchen a new kitchen can function a lot better with a new layout and a lot of the new things that go into kitchens. Things like soft closing drawers, specialty in cabinet and under cabinet lighting, multiple sinks, multiple dishwashers, on demand hot water taps, spice drawers and newer corner cabinets that are hinged to waste little to no space. A new kitchen also gives you the maximum amount of life; you should easily get to 15 to 20 years of use out of your kitchen. A re-faced kitchen will require constant maintenance and updating as the years go by.

Remember that if you just face lift your kitchen you will be working on replacing the appliances in the existing holes, this can limit the size and shape of the appliances you can buy. Most older kitchens are poorly laid out, re-facing a kitchen doesn’t help the poor layout or the fact that a lot of older kitchens are cut off from the rest of the house, giving it that claustrophobic feel to it.

I would recommend if you have the budget to demolish the kitchen and start from scratch, redoing a kitchen is a big deal and a big hassle, do it right and you won’t have to worry about it for decades.

Rob Abbott
Village Builders Inc.