Kitchen Cabinets? Is it time for a facelift?

Your kitchen cabinets: Is it time for a facelift? Update your cabinets with a facelift instead of a transplant. If you’re looking for a home makeover that will give you the most bang for your buck, look no further. Cabinet refacing offers less expense, mess and waiting time. It will transform your kitchen and adds value to your home with instant beauty. You can choose from a variety of styles and materials to reach the desired look you’re shooting for. Are you debating between new cabinet doors and refacing your worn, old cabinets? Are your current cabinets damaged or falling off the hinges? Often, homeowners purchase new cabinets when they are unsatisfied with the function and layout of their current cabinets.

While the outside of your cabinets are scratched and scuffed, the insides may be good as new. It would be difficult and expensive to replace old cabinets with new models of equal quality. Older cabinets were built with greater care and better materials than the mass produced cabinets of today. The 80’s was not a good decade for quality of cabinetry. There were a lot of flimsy oak doors installed. Those do not make sense to keep as the interior of many of those cabinets are particle board. Homeowners can take their time choosing a design and layout that best suits their lifestyle.

For budget conscious homeowners, refacing is an affordable project. It can save thousands of dollars in labor and material over what it would cost to install entirely new cabinetry. A wood refacing job is typically about 50% less than it would be to replace the entire kitchen with high end cabinets. In your average kitchen, a refacing job would cost anywhere from $3500-$7000, depending on the materials used. Typically, installers charge an average of $75. per linear foot to install new cabinetry. That means that if you have about 50 linear ft. of cabinetry (12x14 kitchens) you would be paying out $3,825 in installation costs alone! That doesn’t include the costs for retiling or patching areas where cabinets fail to line up with the existing footprint.

The best and most expensive of the materials is real wood. They put solid wood door & drawer fronts and wood veneers on the sides and front. Refacing will replace the cabinet doors and drawer fronts with new ones and the rest will be refaced to match your new doors. Unless your budget is constrained, it is usually best to use real wood for refacing. Affordability is one of the biggest reasons many homeowners choose refacing over replacement cabinets. This is the best solution for cabinets that still have life left in them, are useful but have an outdated appearance. This does not change the design of the kitchen cabinets and what you end up with may be beyond your expectations. You may be impressed by your kitchen that now looks new and fresh.

Buyers love to walk into a kitchen that has been nicely updated as that is one less thing on their “To Do” list and keeps more money in their wallets. Refacing is one of the best ways to increase a home’s resale value of more moderately priced homes in the region and across the country. For this and other helpful real estate information, please contact me at Eileen.Mazza@cbmoves.com. I’m happy to help you with your house hunt.