Reface, Re-Door, or Start Over

One door off, six things to look at

You need a #2 Phillips screwdriver, a tape, a torch and something straight — a spirit level, a steel rule, the edge of a shelf. Pick the worst cabinet in the kitchen rather than a representative one: the sink base, or the gable that touches the dishwasher. Cabinets fail from water and they fail from the bottom, so that is where the evidence is. Then repeat the whole thing on two more, one of them a wall cabinet.

What they search at midnight “should I reface or replace my kitchen cabinets” — usually with two quotations open in separate tabs and no idea what is actually wrong with the kitchen. The quotations cannot tell you. The cabinet can, and it takes ten minutes.

• The hinge screw holesBack the two screws out of the hinge plate on the side panel and look into the holes with the torch. A sound hole is a crisp circle with clean shoulders and dense board right to the rim. A failed one is a shallow cone with a fibrous edge, and the board inside has turned to a dust you can blow out. Then drive the screw back in by hand: if it spins freely through the last half turn instead of pulling tight, that hole is finished.What it meansThose two screws carry the whole cantilevered weight of the door every minute of the day, and they get worked again every time somebody adjusts the hinge. Particleboard crumbles around a hole rather than tearing cleanly, so once a hole has gone soft there is nothing left to grip. One dead hole on one cabinet is a repair. Dead holes on the third cabinet you check are a pattern, and a pattern means the boxes will not hold new hardware whatever you hang on the front.
• The gable, along the bottom frontRun a thumbnail down the front edge of the side panel from top to floor, then along the bottom edge on the inside. You are feeling for the melamine or the foil lifting away from the core — a small lip, usually in the bottom two inches, usually on the dishwasher side, sometimes only detectable by fingernail.What it meansA lifted face is a refusal notice. Nothing bonds to a surface that has already let go: not contact adhesive, not veneer, not a laminate skin. And a lifted edge stands roughly a sixteenth of an inch out of plane, which reads straight through a ¼″ skin as a line you will see in raking light for the rest of the kitchen’s life.
• The floor of the sink basePush hard with your thumb in the centre of the cabinet floor, then in both back corners. Sound board does not move. Board that has taken water feels like cork, and the surface is often faintly quilted — low over the fibres, high between them. Look up at the underside of the counter while you are in there, for the stain that explains it.What it meansSwollen particleboard does not dry back. The swelling is the board coming apart internally and it is permanent, which is why the sink base is the cabinet that most often condemns a kitchen. It is also the cabinet nobody inspects, because it is full of bottles.
• The diagonalsWith the door off, measure inside the box corner to corner, both ways, and write both numbers down. Then hold the straightedge across the front edges of the two side panels to see whether the opening is in one plane.The numberWithin about ⅛″ and the box is square enough to work with. Beyond that it is racked, and a new full-overlay door hung on it shows a gap that tapers from one end of the top edge to the other. A three-way adjustable hinge gives you roughly 2 mm on each axis — side and depth on the arm, height on the plate. It can straighten a door. It cannot straighten a box.
• The shelvesClear one shelf completely and sight along it from the end, or lay the straightedge across it. Note how far it has dropped in the middle.What it meansSag on its own condemns nothing — a 30″ span of ⅝″ board under tinned food will always bow, and a replacement shelf is a Saturday morning. It is evidence rather than a verdict. A shelf that has dropped ¼″ tells you what the board in this particular kitchen has been doing, and the gables and the bottom have been doing it too.
• Frame or no frameLook at the front edge of the opening you have just exposed. Either there is a flat wooden band about 1½″ wide running right around the front of the box, or the front is simply the ¾″ edge of the side panel with a strip of banding stuck to it.Why it matters mostThis is the single most useful fact on the page and it takes four seconds to establish. A face frame is a surface you can cover. A frameless edge is not a surface at all. Section 05 is entirely about the difference, and it changes the answer more than the condition of the board does.

Now score it honestly. A dead screw hole, a lifted face, a swollen floor and a racked box are each a fail. Three fails spread across three different cabinets and the boxes are finished, regardless of how the fronts look or what anybody quoted. Zero fails and the boxes are sound, at which point everything that follows is a matter of what you want rather than what is possible. The uncomfortable middle — one bad cabinet in a run of eleven — has its own answer, and it is in Section 08.

Doors-only, refacing, replacement — and why the words get mixed up

The three words are used loosely, including by people selling the work, and the looseness always drifts the same way: a job that is really a re-door gets described as refacing, because the bigger word sounds like the bigger piece of work. Pin them down before you compare anything.

Two useful consequences fall straight out of that table. A refacing quotation on a frameless kitchen should look almost exactly like a doors-only quotation, because on a frameless box that is what it is. And if what you want is on the third row — a wider cabinet, a live corner, drawers — then no amount of comparing the first two rows is going to produce it.

Six complaints a new front will never fix

Hardly anyone refaces a kitchen because they love it. They reface because it looks tired, and then quietly hope the new fronts will also see off the things that have been annoying them for a decade. They will not, and the annoyances are worth naming one at a time — because if two or more of these are on your list, the question in the title has already answered itself.

• The layoutWhere the sink, the range and the fridge sit relative to one another, and how much aisle there is between them. A new front does not move a box a quarter of an inch. If the complaint is that there is nowhere to put a hot tray down beside the range, or that two people cannot be in the room at once, then the fronts are not the subject and never were.What would fix itNew boxes, and even then the drain, the gas line and the range circuit set the limits. Draw the layout you would build before you choose a route; the answer usually falls out of the drawing rather than out of the argument.
• The dead cornerOlder kitchens very often have a corner where one run simply dies into the other, leaving a cavity two and a half feet deep that is reachable only by kneeling and groping sideways past the opening. A new door on that cabinet is a new door on a cavity.What would fix itA blind-corner pull-out or an easy-reach cabinet is a different box, not a different front. Retrofit carousels do exist, but they want a specific opening width and a specific hinge clearance, so measure the opening before believing the photograph. Corner cabinets have their own chapter of grief.
• The width that is three inches shortStock cabinet widths step in 3″ increments and the wall is whatever length the house decided on, so almost every kitchen contains a filler strip somewhere — and very often a 24″ cabinet in the spot where the cook has wanted 30″ for ten years. Refacing freezes every width in the room, including the wrong ones.What would fix itWidths are a box decision and a permanent one. Walk the run with a tape now and write down every place you want more. Three such places and you are looking at a replacement whatever the board turns out to be made of.
• The toe kick at the wrong heightKicks in older kitchens are commonly 3½″ or 4″. Ours are 4½″, which is what a 34½″ box with a 30″ face gives you, and it is the height a lot of North American cabinetry is built around now. The half inch is invisible right up until a new floor goes in, and then it matters in whichever direction the job runs. Lay the floor up to cabinets you are keeping and the kick gives that thickness back and the dishwasher bay shrinks with it — an inch and a half of build-up, which is ¾″ engineered wood laid twice or tile on backer board, takes a standard machine to the bottom of its adjustment and often past it. Lay the floor first and re-set new boxes on top and the kick is unchanged, but the whole counter rises.What would fix itMeasure your kick height and your finished counter height before choosing anything. If a new floor is anywhere in the project, kick height stops being cosmetic. Replacement is the only route in which it is adjustable.
• A run with no drawersThe most commonly regretted thing in a finished kitchen: base cabinets with doors, and a wire basket you fitted yourself that racks in the opening every time you pull it. A door base cannot be converted to a drawer base by changing its front. There is no drawer box, nothing to screw a runner to at the right height, and on a framed box the opening is narrower than the cabinet by two stile widths, so the drawer you could fit is narrower again.What would fix itCount the drawers you have against the drawers you want. If the answer is three more, that is three new boxes, and three new boxes dropped into the middle of a refaced run is a matching problem rather than a saving.
• DepthBase boxes have not always been 24″ deep — 22″ and 23″ are common in older kitchens — and wall cabinets turn up at 11″, 12″ and 13″ deep and at 30″, 36″ and 42″ high. A 22″ run means a modern dishwasher and a modern range stand proud of the cabinet fronts, and the countertop overhang is being asked to close a gap nobody drew it for.How to checkWith one door off, measure from the wall to the front face of the box on a base cabinet and on a wall cabinet. At 24″ the appliance fronts land where they were drawn to — a range standing out to about the counter edge, a dishwasher door roughly level with the cabinet fronts. At 22″ everything sits two inches further proud than that, and every appliance you buy for the next fifteen years will do the same.

And one that is not a complaint until the day the doors are new: the interior. A re-door hands you a brand-new front that opens onto a 1980s inside — two sets of shelf-pin holes drilled by two different people, a raw sawn edge where somebody cut a hole for a waste pipe, a back panel with daylight showing at one corner. It is a strange feeling, and it is the thing people underestimate most about a re-door: the half of the cabinet you put your hands in every day is the half that did not change.

The three numbers that decide whether a re-door is even possible

A door is not a rectangle you order in a colour. It is a rectangle with two precisely located holes in the back of it, and the holes matter more than the rectangle does. Three numbers describe the entire problem, and any supplier who does not ask for all three is guessing on your behalf.

Number one: the opening. On a frameless box, measure the clear width between the two side panels at the front and the clear height between the underside of the top and the top of the bottom — door off, at the tightest point you can find, to the sixteenth of an inch. On a framed box you measure the opening in the frame instead, which is smaller than the box by two stile widths. Do it for every cabinet, not one.

Number two: the overlay. Overlay is how far the door covers the box on each side, and you do not measure it directly — you derive it. Measure the door, measure the opening, subtract, halve. Door width minus opening width, divided by two, is the overlay per side; the same arithmetic on the heights gives the overlay top and bottom. A standard-overlay door on a framed box lands near ½″ per side — which is not the same thing as a “half-overlay” hinge, a term that means two doors sharing one partition. A full-overlay door on a frameless box covers nearly the whole ¾″ panel edge, leaving a reveal of about a sixteenth per edge, which is why two doors that meet show a gap of about ⅛″.

And here is the trap. Overlay is not one number for the kitchen, and where it varies it usually varies on purpose. A door at the end of a run hard against a wall often has its overlay cut back so that it can open at all — the tidier fix is a filler strip, so where you find a reduced overlay you are usually looking at a kitchen that went in without one. The two doors on a corner cabinet frequently carry unequal overlays so that one clears the other, and a cabinet with a filler beside it has often had its overlay tuned so the reveals read evenly from the front. Measure one door, order twenty-two the same, and you will hang a run that closes in five different planes — and the eye finds that faster than it finds a scratch.

Number three: the bore. The hole in the back of the door that the hinge cup sits in, and three measurements describe it. The diameter: 35 mm is the European standard and almost certainly what you have, though a smaller 26 mm cup is used on mini and compact hinges — thin doors and narrow stiles, where a 35 will not fit — and the two do not interchange. The edge distance: from the door edge to the near rim of the cup, commonly between 3 and 7 mm, and every millimetre of it shifts the closed door sideways by a millimetre. And the cup centres: measured from the top of the door down to the centre of each cup. Work in millimetres. The whole hinge system is metric even when the cabinet is not. The hinge chapter works all three numbers through on a real cabinet.

There is one recovery worth knowing about. On a frameless box the hinge arm clips onto a mounting plate screwed to the side panel, and that plate has a height — 0, 3, 6 and 9 mm on a frameless cabinet — which sets the overlay just as much as the bore does. So a door whose bore is a few millimetres out can sometimes be brought into line by changing the plate rather than the door. Sometimes. It is a rescue, not a plan.

One last number if you are keeping the handles: the centres. Bar pulls are commonly made to 96, 128 and 160 mm, and older kitchens are full of 3″ and 4″. They do not cross over — 96 mm is not 4″, it is about 3¾″ — and a set of new doors drilled to the wrong standard is a set of new doors with two holes in the wrong place.

Which is why the answer to all three numbers is one sheet of paper. One row per cabinet: opening width, opening height, door width, door height, overlay per side, overlay top and bottom, hinge count, cup diameter, edge distance, cup centres from the top, and handle centres if the handles are staying. Twenty rows takes about forty minutes, it is exactly the document any door supplier will ask you for, and it is the document that reveals — halfway down, in your own handwriting — that this kitchen has three different overlays in it.

A face frame is a surface. A frameless edge is not.

This is where the refacing conversation genuinely divides, and it is barely ever mentioned, because refacing as a trade grew up on framed North-American cabinets and the vocabulary never caught up with the European boxes that now fill most new kitchens.

Framed. A hardwood frame roughly 1½″ wide is glued across the front of the box — two stiles, a top rail and a bottom rail. That frame does three jobs in a reface. It is a flat, continuous, solid-timber surface that a skin can be glued to along its whole length — usually a veneer a few hundredths of an inch thick on the frame itself, with ¼″ plywood reserved for the exposed ends. Frames do get skinned in ¼″ plywood too, but that pushes the whole front out a quarter inch and every door’s overlay moves with it. It is wide enough to hide the transition where the new skin dies into the old box. And it is what the door hangs on, so the door’s position is set by the frame rather than by the carcass, which means a slightly out-of-square box is somebody else’s problem. A framed kitchen is a real candidate for a real reface, and if it dates from the 1970s or earlier there is a fair chance the box behind that frame is better built than a good deal of what is currently for sale.

Frameless. There is no frame. The front of the box is the ¾″ edge of the side panel with a strip of banding on it, and the doors cover essentially all of it. Ask what gets skinned and the honest answer is: nothing, because there is nothing there to skin. What you can do is re-band that edge — peel the old tape off and iron or glue a new one on — but ¾″ of band has no width in which to hide a lap, a seam or a colour that is half a shade off, and it lives behind a full-overlay door where the only time you will ever see it is as a sliver, with the door open.

So on a frameless kitchen, refacing collapses into new fronts, new end panels and new banding. That is a perfectly good piece of work. It is simply a smaller one than the word implies, and it should be scoped, quoted and compared as the thing it actually is.

There is a second-order effect too, and it runs the other way. A frameless box is the harder one to re-door well. Full overlay means the reveal lines are the only geometry on show, so every sixteenth of an inch of drift reads as a tapering gap beside a neighbour that is straight. A face frame quietly absorbs that; a frameless run advertises it. Which is why the diagonals in Section 01 matter more on a frameless kitchen than on a framed one.

• Check every run, not one cabinet — the front-edge test from Section 01 takes four seconds, and kitchens that have been extended or half-replaced genuinely do contain both. The four tells below confirm it from outside the cabinet.
• Look between two cabinets — framed kitchens show a visible double stile, roughly 3″ of timber. Frameless shows two door edges with about ⅛″ between them.
• Pull a drawer right out — on a framed box the drawer is narrower than the cabinet by two stile widths and often runs on a centre-mount slide with a rear bracket. A frameless drawer runs nearly the full inside width.
• Look at the hinge — a 35 mm cup with a plate screwed flat to the side panel is frameless. A wraparound hinge screwed to the edge of the frame, or a visible barrel on the outside, is framed.
• Count what you would gain — a frameless box still has a ¾″ side, so what you buy back is only the part of the stile that overhangs it: about ¾″ of clear opening on each side, an inch and a half per cabinet. On a 24″ base that is a 21″ opening becoming a 22½″ one, and with an undermount runner instead of a side-mount the drawer box gains more again. The materials chapter has the framed-versus-frameless section in full.

We supply frameless boxes, so that last line is not a neutral observation and you should read it knowing so. The part worth taking from it anyway is the arithmetic: a frame you cover is width you keep losing, and a frame you remove is width you get back. Whether that is worth the disruption is the argument in Section 08. How cabinets are sold — stock, RTA, semi-custom, custom — is a separate question with its own page.

Can you reface particleboard cabinets? Wrong question.

It is asked constantly and it is the wrong shape. Melamine-faced particleboard is not a defect — it is what a very large share of all cabinetry has been built from for forty years, including a great deal of cabinetry people are perfectly happy with two decades on, and including ours: our own sides, shelves and bottoms are ¾″ board — particleboard or plywood, whichever core you pick — faced in melamine on both sides and edged in PVC. Condemning a kitchen because it is chipboard is like condemning a house because it is brick.

What disqualifies a box is not what it is made of. It is what has happened to it, and every disqualifier is visible in the ten-minute inspection.

Not all board behaves the same at a screw hole. Plywood grips a repair best, because there is long grain in there for a screw to bite into. MDF takes a screw beautifully when it is new and blows out at an edge when it is not. Particleboard drives easily and is the least tolerant of water of the three. That is a ranking of repairability, not of quality, and it only matters in the few places a screw actually goes: hinge plates, drawer runners, and the fixings holding the box to the wall. Everywhere else in the cabinet, the difference between the three cores is far smaller than the difference between a dry kitchen and a wet one.

Check the back panel before you lean on anything. A thin back is normal and ours is no thicker — the strength is in the ¾″ rails behind it, and those rails are where the mounting screws are supposed to go. What matters is where yours actually went. If the cabinet is held by two screws driven through the thin back alone into whatever they happened to find, then that box is currently being supported by the countertop and its neighbours as much as by the wall. Perfectly fine for a kitchen standing still. Not fine the moment somebody starts levering an old end panel off to fit a new one, which is a normal step in a reface and the step that most often turns one job into another.

Thermofoil deserves its own sentence, because it is the material people most often want to reface and the one that most often refuses. A rigid-thermofoil door is a vinyl film vacuum-pressed onto a shaped MDF blank. When it fails it peels, usually beside the dishwasher or above the range where the heat is, and once a film has lifted there is no re-bonding it and no coating that will sit on it convincingly. On a thermofoil kitchen the doors get replaced rather than refinished — which is a different decision from the one this page is about, and what will and will not take paint has its own page.

How long the kitchen is out of action — the number people are really deciding on

Money dominates the conversation and disruption dominates the experience. The three routes differ by roughly an order of magnitude in how long you cannot cook, and for most households that gap matters far more than any difference in how the kitchen looks when it is finished.

The question behind that table is usually “which one can I do a weekend at a time?”, and only the first route answers it properly. A re-door is genuinely incremental: take one cabinet’s doors off on a Saturday morning, hang the new ones, and if the third cabinet goes wrong you stop and the kitchen still works that evening. A reface is incremental by run rather than by cabinet, because the skin and the end panels are fitted as one piece and cannot be left half-glued.

A replacement is incremental only as far as demolition day. After that the countertop template sits in the middle of the schedule and cannot be moved forward, because the fabricator measures what physically exists: the whole base layer has to be in and level before anybody comes to measure, and the stone arrives when it arrives — commonly one to two weeks later. That single dependency is what turns a replacement into a three-week kitchen rather than a three-day one, and it is worth planning the household around rather than discovering. The planning chapter covers the temporary kitchen and the order everything happens in.

One sequencing rule saves more grief than any other, and it applies to all three routes: do not take the old fronts off until the new ones are in the house, unwrapped and counted. Doors are the item most likely to arrive short, damaged, or in the wrong hand, and a kitchen with no doors is a kitchen you are living in. Count them against the order the day they land, not the morning you plan to hang them.

There is also a fourth route this page has been quietly ignoring, and it belongs here because it is the least disruptive of the lot: paint. It is not always available — a thermofoil door will not hold a coating at all, a melamine or laminate slab only will with a bonding primer and real mechanical prep, an open-grained oak needs filling before it will read as smooth, and the preparation is the entire job. But on a sound framed kitchen with painted or bare timber doors it can be done a door at a time in a garage over a month of evenings, with the kitchen in full use throughout. Which doors will actually take paint is a question with a real answer.

Starting over when the boxes are sound — and stopping when they are not the problem

Everything so far has been evidence-gathering. This is the part where the evidence gets weighed, and it goes both ways far more often than the argument usually allows.

The case for replacement even when the boxes pass.

• The door work is the same either way — twenty doors bored, hung and adjusted is most of a day whichever route you take, and on a re-door part of that day goes on plugging the old plate holes first. So replacement is not a re-door plus a little more per cabinet. It is a re-door plus one lump of box work — demolition, levelling, scribing to a wall that is not plumb, the counter, the plumbing — and that lump happens once, not twenty times. Weigh it against the four things below, none of which a re-door can buy you at all.
• Drawers — the honest number-one reason. Three drawers where a door used to be is the change people name when asked what altered how their kitchen works, and it is unavailable by any other route.
• Depth, height and the corner — a full 24″ base depth, a tall unit that actually runs to the ceiling, and a corner that gives its contents back are three gaps a reface makes permanent for another fifteen years.
• The single-age kitchen — a refaced kitchen has two ages and the old half is the hidden half. Runners, shelf pins, back panels and the kick fail on their original schedule, one at a time, behind fronts that still look new, and every one of those failures is now awkward to get at.
• The straightedge problem — a crisp flat modern front is the least forgiving thing you can hang on an old box. A Shaker at least has a frame to break the eye; a slab door in gloss or matt shows every sixteenth of drift across a run of six. A refaced kitchen can genuinely look worse than the tired one it replaced, for exactly this reason.

The case against, when the layout already works.

• Sketch the kitchen you would build with no constraints — and if the sink is in the same place, the appliances are in the same places and the runs are the same lengths, your complaint is the fronts. Buy fronts. A re-door on sound boxes is the highest-return thing in this entire guide.
• Selling or letting — fronts and handles change everything a viewer sees, and nothing else is visible in a photograph or a ten-minute viewing. Replacing the boxes buys you nothing anybody will notice.
• A genuinely good old box — solid timber frames with dovetailed drawer boxes are better made than plenty of what is sold now. Replacing that to gain a soft-close is a poor trade, when new hinges and new runners inside the old box get you the same feel in an afternoon.
• Stone you are keeping — if the countertop is quartz or granite and staying, replacement is effectively off the table anyway. A templated stone top is siliconed to the boxes it was measured against, rarely survives being lifted whole, and its cut-outs will not line up with new cabinet positions.
• One bad cabinet — a single failed sink base in a run of eleven sound ones is a cabinet problem, not a kitchen problem. Replace the cabinet.

And then there is the split job, which is rarely offered and often right. Replace one run and re-door the rest. Very frequently the run with the dead corner, the no-drawers problem and the water damage is the only one with anything actually wrong with it, while the wall of uppers opposite is entirely sound. New boxes there, new fronts everywhere, one finish across the whole room, and the only thing you have to get right is that every front comes from a single order so the colour matches batch to batch.

Two warnings before you plan around it. It is not a standard product anywhere, including here, so ask explicitly and early whether a supplier will do it — most quoting systems have no row for it. And the matching risk is real: a finish ordered twice, six weeks apart, can be visibly different under under-cabinet light even when it carries the same code. One order, one batch, one delivery.

What to have in your hand before you ask anyone for a design

Whoever you ask — us, a kitchen shop, a contractor, a piece of software — hands back an answer shaped like the information you gave them. Most of the useless answers in this trade come back from a request that contained a photograph and a rough idea of the room. Here is what turns it into a real one.

• Wall lengths at three heights — floor, counter and roughly 6′ up, corner to corner, not cabinet to cabinet. Walls are rarely the same length top and bottom, and the smallest number is the one that governs. The measuring chapter has the method and the order.
• Ceiling height at both ends of every wall — plus the underside and the depth of any bulkhead.
• Every opening, with its casing — window and door rough openings and the trim around them, plus the floor-to-sill height. The casing is what a cabinet actually collides with; the opening is not.
• The existing counter height and the toe kick height — 34″, 35″ and 36″ all exist in the wild, and the kick underneath them runs anywhere from 3″ to 4½″.
• Box depths, with a door off — base and wall, measured wall face to box face. Not to the door, not to the edge of the counter.
• Every appliance you are keeping — width, height, depth including the handle, and how far the door swings open.
• Services, dimensioned from a corner and from the floor — drain stub, supply stops, gas, the range circuit, and every outlet and switch. These set what any layout is allowed to do.
• The sheet from Sections 01 and 04 — per cabinet: opening width and height, door width and height, overlay per side, overlay top and bottom, hinge count, bore diameter, and a pass or fail on the screw holes.

Then the photographs, which are worth as much as the numbers and take five minutes. Shoot each wall square-on from the opposite corner with the doors closed. Shoot each run from one end, along its length, so the reveal lines are visible and anything crooked shows itself. Get the inside of the sink base with the doors open and the torch on. Get one door off and photograph the hinge, the plate and the two screw holes close enough to see the board itself. Get the exposed end of every run, and the toe kick where it meets the floor. And get the ceiling line at every corner, plus both sides of any bulkhead.

That set answers, without a site visit, almost every question anybody will ask you back — and the screw-hole close-up answers the one question that decides the whole thing.