Cabinet Refacing vs. Painting: Which One Gets You the Kitchen You Actually Want?

I started New Look in 2006, and in 20 years of sitting at Long Island kitchen tables I've noticed something about the people who ask me "should I just paint?" Almost none of them are asking about money. They're standing in a kitchen they don't like, somebody told them painting is cheap, and what they really want to know is whether cheap is going to be enough.

Sometimes it is. If you like the shape of your doors and you just want them white, a painter can do that. We don't paint cabinets, and I'm not going to pretend we do.

But if you look at your cabinets and what bothers you is the style — the raised-panel profile from 1994, the cathedral arch, the oak grain that shows through every coat anybody's ever put on it — then a price comparison is answering a question you didn't ask. Painting changes the color of the door. It can't change the door.

Cabinet painting recoats the doors and drawer fronts you already have. The doors get cleaned, sanded, primed and painted, then hung back on the same boxes with the same hinges, through the same handle holes. Every profile, every edge, every bit of grain is still there underneath. It's a finish, applied in your kitchen, to the cabinets you own today.

Cabinet refacing replaces the doors, drawer fronts, hinges and handles with new ones, made to fit your existing cabinet boxes, and covers every exposed frame with a matching veneer so the finish is continuous. The boxes stay on the wall. What you see and touch is new. What you don't see stays.

That's not a difference of degree. Painting keeps the door and changes its surface. Refacing takes the door away. It's why one of them can change the style of your kitchen and the other one can't.

We price refacing per door and drawer front: $250 to $450 each, depending on the door style and material. A typical 10×10 kitchen has around 40 fronts, which puts most of our projects between $10,000 and $18,000. Hinges and handles are included. Soft-close mechanisms and pull-outs aren't. The full breakdown, including what moves the number up or down, is on our cabinet refacing cost page.

I won't publish a figure for painting, for the same reason I don't publish one for refinishing: we don't sell it, so any number I gave you would be a guess dressed up as advice. Painters price by the kitchen and the hours, and the quotes swing a lot with how much prep the doors need. Get that number from a painter.

What I can tell you straight is that painting costs less. It should — you're paying for labor and a finish, not new doors. If a refacing company tells you otherwise, ask them to show you the math.

Refacing costs more for the same reason people choose it. Here's what changes on a refacing job that stays exactly the same on a painted one:

Two of those rows matter most if you're the person who wants a different kitchen.

Door style. A raised-panel door painted white is a white raised-panel door. If you want a shaker or a flat slab, the door has to go, and that's refacing by definition. The five door styles we install are the menu. Painting has a menu of one.

Material. Paint has a hard time holding on laminate and thermofoil — there's no wood underneath to sand back and grip — and that's what a lot of kitchens built since the '80s are made of. Refacing doesn't care what the old door was made of, because the old door comes off.

A refaced door is a new door. It shows up with a factory finish, applied and cured under controlled conditions on a surface that's never been stripped, and it wears the way any new cabinet door wears.

A painted door is an old door with a new coat on it. Done well, it can look great. Done in a hurry, it fails where finishes always fail first: the edges people grab, the rail over the dishwasher that takes the steam, the cabinet next to the sink.

I'm not going to tell you how many years paint lasts, because it depends almost entirely on the painter and the kitchen, and anybody who gives you one number is guessing. What I can tell you is where the spread comes from. Refacing results cluster, because the doors are made the same way every time. Painting results spread out, because everything rides on how carefully one person prepped one surface in your kitchen.

Painting is enough when all three of these are true: you like the style of the doors you have, they're solid wood in good shape, and a new color is the whole of what you want. If that's you, hire a painter. I'll tell you the same thing at the estimate, because I'd rather lose the job than sell you work you don't need.

Painting isn't enough when the shape of the door is the problem, when the doors are laminate or thermofoil, when the hardware is dated and the old holes are in the wrong spot, or when you already painted once and you're unhappy again. Every one of those is a door problem, and door problems are what refacing fixes.

And refacing is the wrong call sometimes too. If your cabinet boxes are failing — swollen under a leaking sink, shelves sagging — or you want the layout changed, that's a remodel, and I'll say so.

A huge share of the houses in Nassau and Suffolk went up in the twenty years after the war: the capes and ranches that spread out from Levittown, and the colonials that filled in around them. Those kitchens were built with solid, no-nonsense cabinet boxes that have carried sixty years without complaint. What's aged is everything you can see. A homeowner in Levittown, Plainview or Coram staring at 1970s doors is exactly the person for whom painting fixes the color and misses the point.

In Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan, the math adds a building. Painting happens in the apartment — sanding, solvent, wet finish, for as long as it takes. Refacing shows up finished; the work in the apartment is installation. When a co-op or condo board has to approve the alteration and live with the disruption, that difference is usually the first thing they ask about.

We work out of our shop in Farmingdale, we're licensed in Nassau, Suffolk and New York City, and our own crews do every installation — nobody gets subbed out. Local pages: Nassau County · Suffolk County.

That's what a homeowner says when the style changed. Nobody writes "speechless" about a fresh coat on the same door. More of the certificates, and our Google reviews, are here.

If the color is the only thing wrong with your kitchen, paint it. If the doors are wrong — the style, the material, the hardware — painting gives you the same doors in a different color, and in a few years you'll be back here asking the same question.

Refacing costs more because it replaces the part you're unhappy with. New doors in the style you choose, new drawer fronts, new hardware, veneered frames, installed in 3–5 days by our own crews, on boxes that were already sound. That's not a cheaper kitchen. It's a different one.