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Kitchen cabinets refacing is the quickest, most economical and efficient way to completely transform your cabinets, says Cynthia Shull, a designer at Kitchen Mart, a kitchen and bathroom remodeling company with showrooms in Sacramento and Rocklin. The process, which applies new wood or laminate veneer over existing cabinetry and adds custom doors and drawer fronts to match, enables you to keep your existing countertops, if you choose. It also helps save the environment by not throwing perfectly good wood cabinets into a landfill.
"Refacing makes sense if the boxes of your existing cabinets are structurally sound and the basic layout of the kitchen is OK," Shull said. "We can also modify existing cabinets to accommodate new appliances and upgrade them with such options as new easy-to-clean drawers, rollouts, tilt trays and solid wood breadboards. We can even build new cabinets to match so that no one can tell which cabinets are new and which ones are not." The process begins by removing and discarding the old doors, drawer fronts, hinges and trim. Next, 1/4-inch wood or laminate veneers are bonded to all exterior surfaces of the cabinets. Finally, new doors, drawer fronts, semi- concealed hinges and new trim, as necessary, are installed, she says. Many colors and door styles in laminates and natural oak, maple, alder or cherry wood in a variety of stains are available. Kitchen Mart recently added a new finishing process called shadowing, which adds detail to the color and depth to the detailing on the wood doors of both refaced and custom-built cabinets. When Amanda Walker of Gold River decided to update her kitchen last year, she asked Kitchen Mart to change the whitewashed oak cabinets originally installed in 1990 to Tuscan-style walnut-stained cherrywood cabinets with raised panel doors to make the kitchen feel warmer. "I decided on refacing because I had put a new travertine floor in a few years ago, and I didn't need to change the layout of the kitchen," Walker said. "It is also much quicker than replacing cabinets and, of course, less expensive, and that always helps." Walker also had her tile countertop replaced with new granite slabs, allowing Kitchen Mart to reframe some of her cabinets to reconfigure some of the doors into drawers, create room for a small wine refrigerator and build a wine rack. Kitchen Mart made matching panels for the refrigerator and removed the upper cabinets hanging over the peninsula so Walker could see into the family room while cooking. "I'd never done any remodeling before, but it was painless and went remarkably fast – it literally took a week," Walker said. "My friends were just amazed by how quickly and seamlessly my project went." Walker went on to have Kitchen Mart design and build a matching shelving unit and entertainment center for her family room, then returned again a few months ago to reface the cabinets and install new sinks and faucets in two of her bathrooms. "It's night and day from what I had before," she said. "The kitchen and bathroom look so much bigger, it was reasonably priced and I'm thrilled with it." Related Articles |
Cabinet Refacing